[John Hughes]

Great information folks. It does sound like I’m not too far off on how everyone else is dealing with longer projects.
I did figure out a workaround to the pre-rendered segments. I said before that my idea was to create shorter Vegas projects (due to system/render crashes for longer duration/heavy-FX) and wanted to render each of them to MainConcept MPEG2 with AC-3 audio before placing them into a master project for a final render output to DVD that wouldn’t recompress in DVD Architect Pro. The problem was that Vegas couldn’t import the AC-3 files for the master project and I thought I would have to use an intermediary format like AVI or piece them together in DVD Architect via the Video compilation-type project there.
ALL I NEEDED TO DO WAS RENDER AUDIO IN PCM!!! Now I understand that uncompressed audio files are relatively larger but for most of my projects I have only background music and one speaker talking and for videos that are around an hour – it didn’t seem to cause any issues. And of course my Blu-Ray versions were fine also because of the greater amount of space on that media. I really wish I could just slap a bunch of stuff on one timeline and render it out without worry – but I’m always aware of and concerned that I’m going to get a crash. I literally do nothing with my editing computer except for video work in Vegas and renders. I have a solid Intel i7 chip/32GB RAM/GEFORCE GTX (recent) tower, solid-state HDD for my Windows 7 OS, 7200rpm 4GB HDD internal for my media and an external 4GB RAID-0 striped 7200rpm G-RAID HDD for my renders.
Handbrake was suggested by someone earlier in the thread….I’m really wondering if I need to move that direction.

THANKS ALL
John

[John Hughes]

Wayne thanks for your insight. In the past I too went with just one timeline, which evolved into shorter segments that I cut and pasted into a master timeline. Had a few bad experiences with timelines that weren’t the same number of tracks or one had track level keyframes and the others didn’t and such.
I was hoping there’d be an easier solution and thought I found it until I ran into the AC-3 audio issue.
What is Handbrake? Is it a seperate rendering app? Does it seem to work better than Vegas render engine?

[John Hughes]

Thanks for that info Laszlo. I too wind up saving multiple .veg project files as I progress through a longer project as experience has taught me that sometimes Vegas will crash on a specific event or FX it doesn’t like. It puzzles me because I have more than enough CPU power and 32GB of RAM…but it is what it is.
These periodic program or render crashes is what makes me keep my projects as short as possible to begin with.

I’m really hoping to find an answer to my proposed solution however of my shorter ‘segments’ that I can render out and throw all of them into a master project that won’t have to be recompressed on final render (specifically with MPEG2 and the audio issue) for DVD output. Blu-Ray is my other concern as I know there’s more CPU/RAM taxing on that.

[John Hughes]

John,

Always a pleasure to hear from you.

[That shouldn’t be a surprise because file size is controlled by bit rate not frame rate. So whether you have 1 frame per second or 1000 frames per second, the same bit rate will yield the same file size which means that frames at 60fps have less bits to represent them than frames at 30fps at the same bit rate.]

So given your explanation above, video shot at 24fps progressive at 50Mbps like my camera captures would be better quality (relatively) than 60fps progressive at the same bitrate – since more bits are being represented in each of the 24 frames? Is it then just a matter of choosing a higher frame rate if you don’t want the ‘juddery’ look of 24fps (for like say fast-action sports), that you would be making a sacrifice on a little quality? A trade-off so to speak with smoother movement but less overall visual quality?