[Ryosuke Asuka]

it worked! And now i’m just a little wiser when it comes to Vegas. Thank you very much 🙂

[Ryosuke Asuka]

wonderful! Really appreciate the help John!

[Ryosuke Asuka]

hmm, I see.. So does that also mean if I had created the image in photoshop and specified I wanted widescreen aspect ratio pixels, then I could have created the image @ 720×480 and it would have fit?

The one thing I still don’t understand is, in the pan/crop window, why does it actually show the image fitting? Does that window not account for the difference in PAR?

[Ryosuke Asuka]

So I got some answers in another forum; some people suggested that the blu-ray template might have set the upper field first, and dv is lower field. Someone also suggested that I not have vegas deinterlace it because it’s not good at that. I tried those suggestions and the file I got was smooth, but after taking about 6 hours to render and clearly seeing it render the whole video, my output file stops after about 20 minutes! I tried it twice- the second time was a little longer but still it was only a fraction of the video.

The output file is about 20GB which is about the size it would be if it had all the video. Not sure what’s going on here.

The first time I tried, I believe I did main concept avc so I could set the bitrate closer to that of the dv avi file, about 30mbps. The second time I chose sony avc again and set it to 20mbps. The file plays fine in various media players, I also noticed when I tried to import it into vegas to check it out, vegas couldn’t open the file.

[Ryosuke Asuka]

I see, thanks. Ok, I think I am on my way now, I just have 2 more questions-

1- you guys said 8mbps is the highest I should use for dvd, but I see some places say 9.8 is the max for DVD. is 8 the highest ‘safe’ bitrate but some players can do up to 9.8 or something?

2- I don’t see a dvd architect profile for a full audio/video render, but I see one for video streams. “DVD NTSC” has both audio and video though. I’m wondering- I read someone saying before that if you don’t want programs like DVD architect to reencode your file (since it’s already dvd compliant) you should render video and audio separately or something? Would you suggest the same, using the dvd architect video stream and then doing audio separately?

I don’t have dvd architect, I have ulead dvd moviefactory 6 at the moment. But I definitely do want to make sure that my video does not get encoded again and lose any quality…I just want to put what I get out of Vegas onto DVD.

[Ryosuke Asuka]

Hi, thanks for the response. I’m not sure I understand what you mean though… The video itself is not a problem right? Everywhere I’ve looked I see it’s possible to rip a DVD, and put that video on blu-ray (even if it has to be encoded to a new format). It’s just the menus and chapter structure I Canfield find any good recent info on. It sounds entirely possible to rip multiple DVDs to one blu-ray and re-create that menu structure manually, I was just hoping for an easier, automated way…

[Ryosuke Asuka]

Thank you all, for the advice, I will go with what you have suggested.

Out of curiosity, can you tell me what the “GOP Structure” means? Does this refer to the things like i-frames, b-frames, level etc?
Even if my bitrate is at or below the limit for standard DVD, you mean that these things can still cause it to be unplayable in a DVD player?

[Ryosuke Asuka]

Thanks, I really appreciate the responses. And I totally agree- I’m admitting I’m changing settings that I don’t fully understand and know that’s not the smartest thing which is why I’m asking. I did try to do some research before hand, and it DID seem from the descriptions of their purpose that raising i-frames and lowering b-frames would raise quality, but I know a lot less than the people here…

I didn’t realize there was a max bitrate for DVDs, that definitely gives me a better understanding of what my limitations are on that format. The main thing I wanted to get at here is that space concerns are much less of an issue to me than quality. I wanted to know what settings I should use to get the best quality possible, see how much space THAT would take, and then if I think that’s too much, experiment with dialing down the quality to something that gives me an acceptable balance of quality space. I have been experimenting with the existing pre-created profiles as suggested, and I’m sure those are ‘acceptable’, but I’d really like to know the ceiling for best quality encode so I can compare based on that.