[Dave Haynie]

Nevermind… found it. Volume Name is down in the bottom of one of the preferences dialogs. Looked up an old BD project… I had found this before.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

It is entirely based on your length of video, the type and quality of audio you’re including, etc. The real answer is that you can fit about 4,700,000,000 bytes of audio/video on a DVD.

What you want here is a tool called a bitrate calculator. Here’s an online version: https://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm, or Google for more. Enter your paramters, including audio (probably 192kb/s AC-3, if you’re authoring in stereo), and the calculator will spit out a bitrate.

Next, go to your video project in Vegas, and select the template for DVD Architect that’s correct for your video type (eg, NTSC 16:9). Click “custom”. Select “Variable bitrate” and “2-pass”… this will generally produce the best video quality. Enter your calculated average bitrate in the “Average (bps)” box, and you may want to tune down the maximum a bit, depending on how different the average is. Do the render.

Next, render audio the way you entered it in the bitrate calculator… 192kb/s AC-3 or whatever.

Next, load these up in a DVDA project. Hopefully it fits. If it does, render and burn. If not, lower that average a little and try again.

Anyway, that’s how you get the maximum quality for any length video. IF you’re trying to fit crazy amounts, like 3+ hours, you probably want to render to 352×480 (NTSC) or 352×576 (PAL) DVD video instead.. that will look better at lower bitrates.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

It’s a little bit tradition, and a little bit format-related.

Back in the dark ages, DVD Authoring tools only accepted completely finished assets. They did a little basic MPEG-2 rendering for menus, but didn’t convert you video. DVD was a new format, and nothing you had in your video editor or encoder produced something in DVD format. Apps took MPEG-2 elemental streams, WAV files, AC-3 files, or MPEG Layer 2 audio files… they did the DVD multiplexing, etc. from those simpler formats — which also got the DVD authoring apps done quicker.

This is still a tradition with Vegas and DVDA. The main reason DVDA accepts a DVD-format MPEG-2 PS rather than elemental stream are chapter marks and other imports… an elemental stream is just the MPEG-2. There is no official standard for AC-3 or uncompressed in an MPEG-2 file (technically, the .VOB file format on DVD is an extension of the MPEG-2 format that supports these, but this not part of the MPEG-2 standard). You COULD technically produce an MPEG-2 stream with MPEG Layer 2 audio an author a correct DVD… for Europe. On Region 1 DVDs, MPEG Layer 2 is a secondary format (optional playback on player), not a primary format (mandatory playback on player).

As for how long your video can be … 4,700,000 bytes. That’s the real answer. You can use a bitrate calculator to figure out how much compression you need, based on your audio type and video length. Then you compress it, using the best quality 2-pass encoding from Vegas (don’t leave it to DVDA to compress), and then burn a preview disc, and determine if you’re happy with the quality.

I made a small film back in 1994 which went to DVD some years later (using one of the aforementioned early DVD authoring tools, Pinnacle Impression, formerly Minerva Impression, possibly the most bug ridden piece of drek I ever managed to coax useful work from). The main film is 2 hours long, there are some 30+ minutes of outtakes and other special features (a photo gallery, music videos, etc). It looks good because, frankly, the video was crap. I shot it 1994 in Video8, not even Hi8, and the DVD was compiled from both the original tapes and an SVHS master. So a little more compression there didn’t greatly impact the video, because the whole video process was low-pass filtered. I’m not suggesting an HD downconversion will look acceptable a 3 hours or more on a DVD, but it’s up to you.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Most DVD/BD player software can access your VIDEO_TS directory in a DVD project and play it just as if it were a DVD. This is, in fact, more common than the ability to play ISO files. Though ISOs are not a problem either, there a numerous free utilities that let you mount an ISO file as a virtual disc drive. I typically store DVDs as separate files and BDs as ISOs, but that’s pretty much because that’s how DVDA delivers them.

As for fully authored BDs (menus, chapters, etc) you need DVDA or some other authoring tool. M2TS isn’t a CODEC, it’s a file format… specifically an MPEG-2 transport media container format. This file format is, in fact, used for BD output. It can contain MPEG-2 or AVC (MPEG-4 Part 10) in one of the formats supported by Blu-Ray. DVDA will happily take your BD-compliant AVC or MPEG-2 and put it into a properly formatted MPEG-2 TS file, or it’ll transcode most anything else to your CODEC of choice (AVC or MPEG-2… VC-1 is also supported by BD, but may not be supported by DVDA).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I think they essentially shipped with 10.0a.. that’s the first one I downloaded, and I bought on or about release day.

If you’re not seeing crashes, you’re lucky. For me anyway, 10.0a has been the buggiest release since 8.1… crashes all the time. I’m sure it depends on what you’re doing. It hasn’t prevented me from getting work done, but unfortunately, the things I could be doing in Vegas 9 aren’t so much of a problem — the things I need in Vegas 10, or are complex to move to Vegas 9 (Sony really needs to re-think their no-backwards-compatibility policy… I should at least be able to export from 10 to 9), are stuck in Vegas 10.

Last night, it crashed three times, each when I was simply adding a mask to a layer. I have used masks elsewhere, so I know its not a general problem, but maybe specific to that project. Who knows?

At least in the past, Vegas (and the other Sony tools) do get improvements, sometimes even new features, after release. Sony/Sonic Foundry have been very consistent with this over the years… most Versions of Vegas have been among the most stable tools of any kind I use on my system … even compared to $10,000 electronics CAD software. So there’s hope. Most folks do realize that “rev x.0”, or in Sony case, the rev that ships on release day, is something of a gamble. Even when you, like in my case, that doesn’t necessarily stop the “new toy” aspect from overriding common sense.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I used it on a bit of Glidecam-shot footage that just need a little correction, and it worked pretty nicely. You do get excessive cropping if you ask for too much correction — I’m not sure how smart the “analysis” stuff is. Doesn’t seem to vary dramatically by content. Then again, it’s pretty new.

At some point, I’ll compare to the BCC7 stabilizer.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Of course, online it’s different… even YouTube supports 720p and 1080p, albeit at crappy bitrates.

But that’s another factor in favor of the HMC40.. you can shoot in 1080/30p, 1080/24p, 720/60p, etc. Interlace and the net don’t mix as well, and HD is already the expected delivery format, at least for much of the net.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

RAID5 systems will spend SOME CPU time working out the format. It’s not like they have crazy work to do to figure out where to send what.. they simply have to create the redundant data, so there’s a fair bit of extra processing. It’s nothing close to consuming a whole core on a modern system, but it’s a waste of a good bit of x86 code.

This problem is solved by using a “hardware” RAID… meaning, you get a PCI card with a tiny RISC processor of some sort on it, and the RAID software runs there, not on your PC. At that point, writes will at least seem fast, since the card will grab buffers from PC memory and do all the computing of distributed parity data out on the card.

RAID systems to technically slow down seeking. Rather than hit the average of your single drive, a seek has to wait for the worse case of each drive involved. This is usually offset by the fast that you’re loading N times as much data per seek. But if your system isn’t buffering enough, this is also a problem.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I’ve been doing much rendering lately myself. I have an AMD 1090T CPU (6 cores, 3.2GHz), a nVidia 8800GT CPU (nothing special these days), 8GB of DDR3 DRAM. I generally render from one HDD to another.. if the project gets very complex, I’ll use multiple SATA input drives and render out to USB.

In all recent testing, I get 97-100% CPU utilization. I was able to make the CPU drop to about 90% by compositing two DNxHD files from the same HDD. Fixed that when I moved one to a separate drive (the C: drive in this case… don’t worry about VM when you have more RAM than you need for the job).

So yeah, your performance. If there’s a filter that’s a bottleneck and not capable of multithreading, that could do it. It’ll be obvious… you’ll have the one CPU nailed, the others not so much, and when you disable that filter, the problem goes away (or shifts to the next filter). With a fast multi-core CPU, it’s definitely possible to beat your HDDs, particularly if you have many assets from the same drive… don’t let your input drives thrash.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Install the 32-bit version. See if they magically appear.

The way plug-ins are designed (both FX plug-ins and video CODECs, apparently), you need 32-bit versions for 32-bit apps and 64-bit versions for 64-bit apps. So older plug-ins don’t show up in 64-bit Vegas.

You can, of course, have multiple versions of Vegas installed at the same time. This works for 32-bit vs. 64-bit just as it works for different major versions of Vegas.

-Dave