[Chris Estrada]

Okay so the Sony AVC templates work! Thanks again Steve.

The 512 was just a test, so then I rendered again in 2128. Worked again, but still looks like crap. I know I shouldn’t have high expectations for a web format but.. man, it’s depressing.

The other two options are 3128 and 6256. Since the latter value is double the former value, I’ll assume there are sound mathematical reasons for this gap, but I wish there was something in between. If my calculations are correct, the resulting file is also doubled – from 500 MB to 1 GB give or take.

It probably belongs in another thread but I wouldn’t mind recommendations for mpeg2 settings to include this clip in a DVD using DVD Architect. A reasonable file size without comprising the quality too much. The footage was shot on the street during Brazilian carnaval, at night and with no lighting other than floodlights set up by the city for a presentation I was involved in. The original bitrate was probably overkill, and I’m starting to think there is logic in shooting in lower quality in such situations to avoid resampling artifacts later

[Chris Estrada]

I tried the MainConcept template with no luck. I thought I had done the Sony AVC but looking at it again now I am not so sure. Trying it now with the first 512kbs option (I’m not sure what difference the “baseline” option would make), I’ll let you know how it goes.

[Chris Estrada]

BINGO!!!!! that seems to have solved it, thank you so much Mr. Nigel!

I would have thought that changing the settings from the drop-down menu would have automatically unchecked that box which I heretofore did not know about.

Sorry for the noob-ish post, I appreciate the quick responses

[Chris Estrada]

Vegas 11, sorry for leaving that out!

No, the rendered videos seem okay, although I haven’t made that many since coming back to the program. Also, if I play a file in the TRIM window, there is no problem at all. It just flickers in the main preview window.

I’m not using any effects either. I’m using Vegas just for editing ethnographic-style videos of performances for my research, and the fanciest “effect” I use is usually just crossfading. But I don’t even have any crossfades set at this point

[Chris Estrada]

Hi John, my new guru. You probably haven’t slogged through my first long post and here I am writing another.

First, I have been thinking about selling this computer since I will be moving back from Brazil to the US. It served me well for a couple years while doing fieldwork but a quad-core sure seems to be what Vegas wants.. I had done a semi-customized build with a shop that semi-customizes computers and told them I wanted good hardware for video editing… And I learned to never trust salesmen and always do your own research. Sort of knew that already but I was in a situation where I had to make a decision fast, with limited time to bring back a new machine from the US to my field site. If only I had known about this wonderful forum first… When I get to where I am going to build something new I am sure I will be coming here a lot for tips.

That being said, I am now rendering the 2nd part of the DVD (Volume 2!) and it seems to be moving much faster. One thing just occurred to me about why that might be.

While rendering the ‘first volume’, I selected the portion to be rendering and when doing that final step checked the box “only render looped portion”. I had begun to delete the portions I didn’t want rendered (after saving the project, obviously) but for a few reasons decided to go with rendering only the selected portion. At least one of those reasons is an ever-present fear of accidentally messing up my synchronization by deleting something with ripple turned on and other such foibles.

Well, for rendering the second have, the deleting events on the timeline UP TO where I wanted the rendering to begin seemed a lot ‘cleaner’ visually than the other way around, and easier to make sure I didn’t accidentally jostle anything out of synch.

SO FAR, the processing is chugging along much much faster, and the video is only about 10 minutes shorter than the first.

One *other* option that I wanted to ask you about.. I searched the forums but so many different threads came up it made my head spin. What is the ideal video buffer cache size to use? The Architect rendering template has a default of something like 33 KB which makes me thing I don’t understand what they really mean by buffer as that seems absurdly small. Hoping I wasn’t going to wreck the rendering I went all crazy and increased that number to 500, still less than a megabyte..

[Chris Estrada]

Thanks again John, you really seem like `the man` at these forums. And if you’ve written any kind of `best practices` FAQ or Wiki type page, I will read every word of it.

This video has 6 tracks comprised of:
#1 – Text overlays for titles (names of singers who appear in the video, some credits at the end. In total around 10 `text events` or less)

#2 – about four minutes of video from a handy-cam Kodak “HD” recorder that i spliced in

3# Photo overlays for when I have gaps in my video footage or the footage was too awful or shaky to use. Once more, only a few of these `events` in the timeline

4. Main video track
5. Audio track from camera, muted for probably 80% of the video and used almost entirely just for synching purposes with #6
6. Stereo audio track mixed down from multitrack audio in Steinberg Cubase 5.

The only thing different about this session from previous sessions that I can think of is that in the past (at least once or twice) I did my upsampling to 48 khz (video sampling rate) OUTSIDE of Vegas. And instead of PCM 16-bit wav, I probably converted to 320 mp3 for at least one of those projects, and set the values accordingly in Vegas so that no recompression would occur.

Even so, audio compression from WAV and upsampling from 44.1 to 48 should NOT account for such a huge time lag. I am currently 8 hours in, with 7 hours to go, for a 90 minute video. Obviously since rendering nearly maxes out CPU, I am doing nothing else serious with the computer while it is rendering aside from sending you this message and taking care of business related things with Skype. When that is over I close everything in Taskmanager including explorer.exe and just leave Vegas to process…

I admit to knowing nothing about composting and left the two tracks containing video in `compost alpha` mode. As previously mentioned there is only about 3 or 4 minutes in the timeline where there is video present on more than one track.

So if Architect is such a pain, why do you (or anyone) use it other than it interfaces well (or, well enough) with Vegas or Movie Studio? Is there any other authoring software you use? I began exploring other applications just to burn off a quick smaple copy to show to my main `informant` in this project (I doing anthropological fieldwork. These people are “non-professional” musicians, so to speak, who perform for the sheer love it and make their living doing other things. I’ve been making excuses since Friday on why I don’t have a video to show him and my technical reasons don’t mean much to someone not acquainted with the issues at hand, and are even weaker since I only halfway know what I am talking about to begin with..).

Nero software is still just as bad as I remember it being so I wrote off that option after about 10 minutes of futzing with the latest version of `Vision.` DVD Lab Pro seems like a handy (and small) little authoring application that has most of the features of semi-pro or possibly even pro-editing software. If I had set my rendering in Vegas to use closed GOPs, DVD Lab would wave recognized the chapter points and everything and burned off a copy pretty painlessly (I believe). I wish I had just done that now — I only had about 4 chapter markers in this 90 minutes of video anyway and it would have taken all of five minutes to locate them and remark them…

[Chris Estrada]

Thus far, the videos I have made for people have all been over 90 minutes.. And for the most part pretty amateur, during my ethnographic research, and very much amateur except for the sound which I record much more professionally using external microphones, so I didn’t worry too much about crunching 2 hours onto a DVD. I was able to successfully do this in Vegas and Architect on two occasions, as well as one other video that was only 1 hour in length, using customized settings in the NTSC Main Concept MPG-2 settings as a starting point.

I appreciate your response on this. But can you tell me why Architect can`t simply recognize the 4 GB file as a 4GB file and instead tells me that its 6 GB? Seeing as it is mpg2 and not AVI or some other format, it should be able to handle this, if I’ve been understanding anything so far.

This has been trial-by-fire learning with video for me and I`ve only been doing it because I’ve been asked to by people who I’ve collaborated with in ethnographic research for two years. Honestly I would much rather have just kept on with audio field recordings! But I have begun to enjoy this, when it works out okay it ends up being worth it.

The processor is a AMD Athlon II X2 250 3Ghz. I do not use any color correction and audio compression is (ideally) done by me beforehand although in this case I was using master files from a CD at 16-bit/44.1khz. That still shouldn’t account for 16 hours to process 90 minutes though..

oh I forgot to mention, on this last rendering run I used the AWESOME bitrate calculator that you linked to (in this post? or another?) in order to figure out what bitdepth should be my “target” to fit my 2 hours on this DVD, then I lowered it even further to give it some headroom. And, alas, the file is barely over 4 GB but Architect sees it as 6GB. Sorry to keep harping on this but I am to the point of just thinking about burning this one off in Nero…

[Chris Estrada]

I have been having almost identical problems with Architect and am beginning to wonder why anybody uses it since it has so many issues with recognizing file size and so on.

I am using Sony Vegas Pro 10, rendered to Main Concept MPG-2 twice now for the same project.. The first time I ended up with a 10 GB render, which took literally 34 hours to process. The video is about 3 hours, so the quality would have been s**t anyway, most likely. On to my next attempt, dividing it up into 2 parts. This time, Part One will be almost two hours and the last hour on Part Two. 16 hours of rendering gave me a file that is 4.3 GB in size. Add in a *few* menu buttons. Now, of course, DVD Architect is telling me the mpg file is 6 GB. I took John’s advice and ignored the warning, tried to burn it as it is, and it won`t work.

I’ve been messing around with Vegas for only a few months now and like the workflow, but I will confess — I either didn`t see, or chose to ignore the Architect templates. Possibly because I wanted to tweak the audio settings (I am more of an audio engineer than a video person, just making videos as a favor and for research work). Do I really need to use one of those templates in order to get this burned to a DVD?

I am running Win7 64-bit with a fast processor and 8 GB of RAM, really wish the rendering wasn`t so painfully slow. (Pinnacle was worse on this system, I could barely edit in the first place…)