[Dave Haynie]

oops!

[Dave Haynie]

I pull it up in architect and at the bottom it says “disc space used 5.0gb”. Is the menu really that big? I haven’t changed it. Is there anything I can do?

Don’t know.. depends on the menu. If you have a graphic for each one, shouldn’t be a big deal. If you have video, maybe.

The thing to do is click on the File/Optimize Disk… menu option. This will show the assets in your project, those that DVDA likes, and those that DVDA wants to encode/re-encode.

First, check that all of your pre-rendered stuff has the green checks.
Anything with the yellow “exclamation” box will be recoded. You can click on tabs here, and perhaps adjust some of these. Also, the default re-code/encode setting is here… usually something like 8Mb/s. Drop that, and the stuff getting encoded will take less space in the budget.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Every load gets faster. This used to be a much bigger deal than it was, since most programs actually fit in RAM now (you don’t have the “spectulative” load causing a program to continue to load during its use). But Windows itself is doing all kinds of stuff on your system drive — this all gets faster.

The one thing you probably want to do, after you get that drive up and running, is to move your swap file to a different partition. Sure, you’d love the extra speed for swapping, and with a decent amount of memory (I have 8GB too), you don’t get much thrashing. On the other hand, if you ever do, the SSD will wear out dramatically faster than an HDD — it has a lifetime limit on writes per block.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

You need to use a fairly recent version of the Windows Media Encoder (Windows 7 will do, and some upgrades to Vista .. not sure about XP), and specify the “Advanced” profile. That’s create a VC-1 spec file. You can tell… pre-VC-1 WMV3 has the WMV9 FourCC code, VC-1 has the WVC1 FourCC code.

I kind of question whether Nero Vision is smart enough to use VC-1, now that I’ve thought about it a bit. But it would be obvious… a disc built in Nero Vision in minutes, rather than hours.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[i]No one knows where Vegas will go with more GPU acceleration or whether choosing a Quadro card over a GeForce card makes any difference. In the absence of any compelling evidence, I would personally choose the cheaper option.[/i]

That’s precisely why I wouldn’t go overboard on a GPU right now. Like CPUs, there are new GPUs on a regular basis. I had high hopes for Vegas 10, given how many other NLEs are using edit-time GPU acceleration. And true, you may get some via plug-ins (BCC7 uses some OpenGL, which is hardware accelerated…. don’t think they do CUDA or OpenCL).

But at this point, most folks don’t see a huge or even important performance boost from the CUDA support that is in Vegas 10’s Sony AVC emitter. I don’t have much other use for 3D on my system… which is why I’m running a serveral-years-old nVidia 8800GT — does all the playback acceleration I need, and, well, I don’t have a great guideline for where to go next.

So maybe there are better benchmarks on Vegas + CUDA now. But unless you’re buying the best possible CPU, I claim money is probably better spent on CPU until the GPU proves useful. On playback, it’s dynamite… a fast PC can be eaten up pretty significantly by 1080/60p playback. With the bog standard Windows 7 AVC decoder, I see less than 10% CPU used on my system, with GPU acceleration. GPU is great, when used. But unless Vegas makes it pay, I’d wait on better GPU support. At about $200, the nVidia GeForce GTX460 is kind of on the edge… not crazy expensive. But cheap enough to want to replace in six months or a year (we can’t really know when/if Vegas gets better GPU support)?

Other things… yeah, it’s 6GB (technically, 6 GiB). The reason the i7 is faster than the i5 or the high end AMDs (I have a 6-core AMD) is the memory interface. Most modern CPUs (AMD, i-anything from Intel) have on-chip memory bus interfaces, rather than external memory controllers on a shared main bus. Some laptop chips have a single 64-bit bus. Most PC CPUs have dual 64-bit buses. The i7 has three 64-bit buses. Memory is always made in power-of-two sized; thus, the system you quote has three 2GiB memory modules.

And I echo what other have said… don’t bother with 32-bit XP. Sure, install it as a secondary boot, or (maybe better and easier, depending on why you still want it) download VirtualBox and install it as a virtual machine, so you can run it alongside Windows 7. I did the conversion of my Windows 7 machine a year ago last October, and didn’t run into anything of significance that didn’t still work in 64-bit Windows 7. Yeah, it’s technically possible, but unless you run lots of really old stuff, not too likely. And without 64-bit addressing, you only get to use about 3.2-3.4GiB of DRAM… and if you buy a video card with 1GB, less than 3GB, if you plan to see all of the card’s memory (if Windows even permits that).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

If he just made a BD-ROM with the WMV file on it, it absolutely would have “just burned that WMV to disc”. He said “Nero”, but didn’t elaborate… was it Nero Vision or Nero Burning ROM? He would have had to load the WMV up into Nero Vision to create an actual Blu-Ray Video disc.

Blu-Ray actually supports MPEG-2, AVC (aka H.264, aka MPEG-4 Part 10), and VC-1. VC-1 is the officially documented form of Windows Media 9 Video, and the more recent versions of WMV9 are fully VC-1 compliant. So it wouldn’t necessarily have had to re-encode, if Nero Vision does VC-1 Blu-Rays and if the video was already Blu-Ray compliant. It probably just does MPEG-2 and/or AVC… just sayin’.

Some players will play WMV files directly. So, much like DVD players sometimes played MPEG-2 files as well as properly authored DVDs, some Blu-Ray players will play MPEG, AVC/MP4, and WMV files directly. Some will not.

To create a proper Blu-Ray Video disc that’ll play on all Blu-Ray players, you have to fully author it, using something like Vision or DVDA. And one can definitely get high quality MPEG-2 or AVC out of Vegas for Blu-Ray creation. As with all serious DVD/BD authoring programs, DVDA wants audio and video in separate files. So you render audio once (WAV, AC-3, etc) then video.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I came to DVD Architect having used a number of tools that came before it. I own a copy of Pinnacle Impression…

The big problem with DVD Architect in a pro environment is that it’s really a consumer DVD tool. Impression was kind of ugly to use, but (aside from being the most heinously bug-ridden pile of drek I’ve ever successfully used on a project), but it didn’t hold your hand. It worked pretty “close to the metal” on DVD. While it didn’t do scripting, if there was an effect possible on DVD, I could do it on Impression.

Most DVD applications, DVDA included, insert their own abstraction layer over top of “native DVD”, which sets limits. DVDA has improved, but also, I have yet to do as much DVD programming as I did back with Impression… so I can’t say if it’s quite there yet.

And now we have it all over again with Blu-Ray. With Apple not supporting Blu-Ray, looking elsewhere is an easy decision if you’re on the Apple tools and want to author Blu-Ray. Since I have DVDA and since it’s already part of my workflow, looking elsewhere is a real question. So far, I just change my interface to work within what DVDA is capable of doing.

And there is a big advantage of DVDA’s ability to support BD and DVD pretty seamlessly from the same project. I spent the last week working on a BD project, and a few hours after that was complete, I had a DVD (mostly just rendering time).

DVDA is building an abstraction layer on BD, too… but one that matches DVD. So you can’t do much of anything that DVDs can’t do but BDs can… and in fact, you can’t even do everything a DVD can do. For example, I was working on a menu that defaulted un-selected items to a non-transparent background color through a mask. This works fine in DVDA… until you try to create a BD. Their BD abstraction doesn’t support non-transparent “transparency” (color 4 in a colorset is the “transparent” color, though on DVD, it doesn’t have to be transparent).

So basically, for complex DVD/BD authoring, DVDA is limited. For mid-range complexity and the ability to just press a button and go from BD to DVD, it rocks.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Technically speaking, you have exactly 9,800,000 bits/second available for both audio and video. If you’re encoding multi-angle video, reduce this to 8,000,000 bits/second per view.

It’s been historically true that some DVD players had a problem playing videos encoded near the peak bitrate, particularly (at least the stories go) from DVD-R. Of course, it may also be the simply fact that commercially encoded DVDs never reach peak.

A professionally mastered DVD usually has an average bitrate of around 4-5Mb/s, with peaks up to 8Mb/s or so. Some of the supposedly higher quality encodings (“SuperBit”, etc). move the average up as high as 6Mb/s, and probably include a second DVD for everything but the film. Of course, a pro-quality DVD is mastered by an MPEG-2 mastering engineer, who manually tweaks the variable bit rate encoder, global low-pass filtering of the main video, etc. to deliver the most visually appealing final result that will fit within the 8,500,000,000 bytes available on a dual-layer disc.

Top quality is nearly always VBR, not CBR. If you have no space constraints, you might go to CBR for encoding speed, but that’s about the only reason.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

YouTube will ALWAYS re-render your upload. So to an extent, you should upload in the best quality you can afford. The limits aren’t crazy… YouTube (last I checked) will take up to 2GB of upload, and unless you have a Director’s Account (which is no longer available, but if, like me, you applied long ago, you still have this), you are limited to clips of 10min or less.

YouTube will handle many formats, but it’s pretty AVC friendly. For anything online, you want progressive video if you have it. Knowing the limited bandwidth, I tend to render to 24p or 30p, depending on how it was shot. For 720p, I usually render AVC at 6Mb/s… YouTube’s 720p runs around 2Mb/s, so you may not get much better video with a higher bitrate, but it depends on the material.

I did a couple of 1080p uploads last summer that passed whatever test YouTube does to give you 1080p back… these were encoded at 20Mb/s using the MainConcept VBR encoder (the Sony encoder doesn’t do VBR and doesn’t do 20Mb/s). They looked pretty good for YouTube, but once you get to 1080p, YouTube is generating a video rate many clients can’t stream (even when you have 10-12Mb/s service, you may not have a clear path to YouTube’s servers that can maintain 6Mb/s or whatever they’re running for their version of 1080p).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

If it’s related to that newly added clip, there’s a good chance the clip is mal-formed in some way. Again, as Mike said, only Sony software engineers are going to make much out of the stack dump you provided.

Vegas is not very good at dealing with file corruption. I suspect that’s intentional — when you assume a file might be bad, you need all sorts of checks that slow down the processing of normal files.

If this was a DV or HDV capture, you can try to re-acquire it from the camera… capture glitches are as common as they used to be, but they sill occur. There are tools for filtering out glitches, too, if there’s a problem with the tape. Some places to look:

https://www.videohelp.com/tools/sections/video-repair-fix
https://home.roadrunner.com/~mwilczyn/mpeg2repair/

-Dave