[Richard K]

You could, if you were of a mind and willing to risk the legal consequences, use a program like DVD Shrink or DVD Decrypter to remove the copy protection, then bring the files into Vegas.

[Richard K]

You may already know this, but you can use a photo or image and set it as a background for menus (I think you right click on the menu and “set background image”. I use Photoshop Elements to tweak photos, say of woodgrain or mossy rock, and add a frosty square in the center for buttons and save as a png. Pretty quick once you do a few.

[Richard K]

I’ve had no trouble with burning to DL on previous projects, but this is the first one that needed to be shrunk.

I tried the Optimize feature in DVDA but all it seemed to do is indicate which of the many, many files needed to be compressed – I found no way to have it automatically compress the files that needed it most or how much to compress which files manually. The documentation on using the Optimize feature is pretty meager from what I could find.

Also tried Fit To Disk and an error box said the “media was too large to fit to disk” (duh) (yes, it knew I was using DL).

It seems like DVD Shrink will work if I can figure out a way around the layer break thing. In no time at all Shrink processed my 11Gb files, reducing them to 78% so they’d fit on an 8.5Mb DL disk. But it seems that when shrinking the prepared files the layer break gets lost and I haven’t found a way to have a burning program (I tried both DVDA and RecordNowDeluxe) find the break or make a new one. I don’t know if it’s even possible to insert a new layer break after the files have been prepared in DVDA. Perhaps someone knows how to do this, or if it can be done? This video has 36 different chapters so I’d think there would be a suitable break point in there somewhere.

Meantime, I’ll check on a DVD Shrink group (I’m going to need a real Shrink before this project is done) and see what I can learn. Thanks for all your help.

[Richard K]

Mike, that sounds like a simple solution and I ran the prepared files through DVD Shrink. But then when I went to burn the “shrunk” files in DVDA to a DL DVD an error box said it “could not suggest a valid layer break region”.

The dialog box said to “examine the error log for suggestions” – I have no idea where to find the error log.

The Finish button is grayed out so I can’t continue.

What would you do?

[Richard K]

Thanks, Mike. One question, the rendered files I have are Mpg2, not .avi, so won’t DVD Shrink be rerendering Mpg and won’t that degrade quality?

[Richard K]

If I put it on one it will be DVD-9. I do like the simplicity of packaging and delivery of one DVD.

The program when rendered in Vegas with the DVDA NTSC template and AC-3 at 192 come out to 11Gb. I don’t want to sacrifice much quality – the program is about 50% talking heads, the rest normal action. I’m thinking if I rerender all 35 chapters in Vegas to Mpg2 using 8000/4800/192 I may be able to get it down to 8.5Gb to fit on a DL DVD. Do you think that would work or would I need to compress more?

[Richard K]

Well, I did figure out some things.

When the Vegas File/Properties/MasterBusMode is set to “5.1 Surround” the rendered AC3 audio files imported to DVDA will play fine, but when the setting in Vegas is “Stereo” the imported files will not show a waveform and the audio will not play.

1. Does anyone know what might be causing the “Stereo” setting to produce non-viable files (the files do show “mass” in Windows Explorer, i.e. they have a size of 3Mb and greater, but when imported to DVDA the “flatline” on the timeline and appear empty).

2. Are there any potential problems I should be aware of when rendering audio using 5.1 Surround (I’m leaving the “joystick” controller on the audio tracks in Vegas in the middle default, untouched). (Also, I am rendering using an audio Custom Template based on the -31 dialog parameters discussed elswhere that has worked fine for me with Master bus setting on Stereo for several previous DVD projects).

Thanks for any feedback and suggestions.