[Luc Enders]

Yes Tmpgenc Xpress supports H264. Not best editor but definitely great renderer.

[Luc Enders]

See this thread: https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/24/895472

Imo Tmpgenc is a great renderer and Sony Vegas is a great editor. So I typically output as uncompressed YUV and then render final output with Tmpgenc as it has more rendering options and good downscale capabilities.

[Luc Enders]

12M = bitrate (Mb/sec)

CBR = Constant bit rate
VBR = Variable bit rate

Passes: 1 pass or multi-pass (Sony supports for couple of formats 2 pass). Multi-pass is necessary for average/peak VBR to first build histogram of scene complexity so it can assign higher bitrates to more complex scenes.

[Luc Enders]

That’s weird. I installed a brand new 64bit Vista Enterprise and when I render with Vegas 9 only installed I can’t play them back.
I can repro this on 3 machines. With Vegas 8 they always play fine.

I wonder if a new codec is required for the UYUV format that Sony Vegas 9 creates since 1 new bit is set. Do you have any additional related codecs installed?

And do you know what value is created in your AVI file at that position? Or if you could drop a tiny AVI file (few microseconds long) somewhere I could take a look. That would rule out the renderer. Thanks.

[Luc Enders]

Also note that closed captioning is an US specific ‘feature’. Doesn’t exist in most other parts of the world.

If you want multiple subtitles you’re best of as Mike mentioned using DVD subtitles feature. You can specificy multiple subtitles which can be selected by the user (DVD player).

Subtitles is seperate from the video stream.

[Luc Enders]

I created a blog entry on this while ago here:

https://lucienk.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!A4AE3FB12A26635!867.entry

Letterboxing is no issue since 1280×720 is same aspect ratio as 1920×1080. Only downside with Vegas is that downscaling is a bit soft compared to Tmpgenc. I do believe though that Vimeo will take MP4 1080p. E.g. choose Sony AVC/MP4 and choose custom and in system tab choose MP4.

Since vimeo now will remove source file after a week for non-plus users I render now as 12M CBR 2 pass instead to get better online quality (but limits # of files obviously).

[Luc Enders]

It will import fine in Vegas but no other player/editor. E.g. it will hang for me in WMP/MPC/KMPlayer and Tmpgenc.

If I remove that bit it will work.

[Luc Enders]

I also would say 2 hour is about the limit unless source material isn’t great. You could split your video evenly to get close to max quality on both DVD’s.

One option if you’d like to keep it one DVD is to use double-layer DVD. Downside with that is that at least in the US you won’t find easily durable archival DVD’s (e.g. Taiyo Yuden silver DVD+R).
But you could create several copies instead.

[Luc Enders]

Actually I found it only repro’s if I have a clip before and after that. If I just render that single cropped clip everything is fine. Weird.

[Luc Enders]

I can’t recall if Vegas supports smart rendering of MPEG2 SD but I think it only supports HDV and for V9 AVCHD has been added.
If it does support MPEG2 SD smart rendering you should see during rendering the message ‘skipping re-rendering…’ in the output window. If not it’s not smart rendering and this means you lose some quality since it needs to recompress again.

If you need best quality then render the parts to uncompressed AVI or increase bit rate significantly (if you don’t have enough disk space for uncompressed AVI).

Another option is to use a program to join the MPEG2 files. That’s potentially more complicated. IIRC I had once an issue with the transition at the join point meaning DVD player could slightly pause where you joined the files (but not sure if that’s always an issue since it’s been a while I’ve done that).