[Wayne Waag]

[Brendon Abel]

I set a constant bit rate of 50,000,000bps
For your final delivery file, the bit rate is pretty high. Your blu-ray player may or may not play it. I’d render a small clip at that bit rate, put it on a thumbdrive or usb drive and see if it will work in your player.

I might redo that adding “markers” for the chapter points rather than in another program. (if you suggest this i suppose)
I add markers in Vegas and export using Vegasaur. It has an option to export marks in the correct MKV chapter format.

I will download MKVtoolnix Gui if you could tell me your version..
I’m using the latest which is v8.6.1.

Does this program give me the ability to add my own image as the background for the title menu and have two buttons: 1. being Play all and 2. being chapter select, which will bring me to another screen to choose which chapter or go back?
No. You misunderstood. There is no chapter menu. Chapter support simply enables to you to skip forward or backward using the Blu-ray remote.

And this file that you create, is it the same file that i could put on a flash drive and plug into the blu ray player, or will i have to go through a different rendering method?
It is the same file. There is no need to re-render from Vegas unless your bit rate is too high. I’d test it. Creation of the MKV file does not involve re-rendering. It is simply re-muxing from an MP4 container to an MKV container which supports chapters. Moreover, it is very fast–mostly copying. BTW, the MP4 container does support chapters, but the Sony blu-ray players do not recognize them–at least mine didn’t.

wwaag

[Wayne Waag]

Glad you were able to finish it to your satisfaction. If you want to maintain quality, forget rendering to DVD. If your final HD file was 40 GB, you could author it to Blu-ray and burn it to a dual-layer disc which holds 50 GB. In that way, you could create whatever menus you like. It does require a blu-ray player.

I used to burn blu-ray discs but have gotten away from it completely, being content with the ability to stream videos to my TV and also to add chapters so I can quickly skip through them. Most of my projects, including GoPro footage are 1080 60P. My workflow: (1) render project to 1080 60P AVC using Handbrake; (2) export an XML chapter file from Vegas; (3)remux to MKV using MKVToolNix GUI adding chapter information; (4) stream MKV file from computer to Sony Blu-ray player (I have an older 2013 model); and (5) “play” the MKV file. The Sony Blu-ray player has no problem with 1080 60P footage and also supports MKV chapters.

I find that “streaming” is so much easier than using discs. If you don’t want to stream, you can always copy the MKV file to a USB drive, which also works with my Sony Blu-ray player. I might add that Blu-ray discs do NOT support 1080 60P–they only supports 1080 60i (or 50i in PAL land). If interested, I can provide additional details.

wwaag

[Wayne Waag]

I’d like to buy it one time and get started.

I’d suggest you first download some trial versions and see what works best for you. You want to make sure that the software will “smart render” your MPEG-2 footage, i.e. render “only” the parts that are changed–not the entire file. VHS is very poor quality to start with. Moreover, your capture device is pretty low-end judging from its cost. Re-rendering will make it look worse. Suggest you take a look at products from Womble (Womble MPEG-VCR and Womble EasyDVD), Videoredo, and TMPGEnc. They all have free trials. You can try Vegas, but it’s more of a full editor not really designed for VHS to DVD conversions. One final point–there is really no need for export to Blu-ray since it will not improve the quality of the VHS, unless all you want to do is put a lot of footage on one disc. Most newer DVD players will do up-scaling automatically. One of the easiest ways (and often the best quality because of hardware encoding) is to use a DVD recorder. Once the DVD is recorded from your VHS player, it can then be imported for final authoring if you want to add chapters, menus, etc. Again, download some trial versions and see what works best for you.

wwaag

[Wayne Waag]

I’ve been using a couple of U2412’s for over 3 years now. Never a problem. A good thing now–the price has come down a lot. At the time, about $400 each. One thing I really like–the screen has a relatively flat “non-glare” surface, unlike other monitors I’ve seen.

wwaag

[Wayne Waag]

Somehow, you have a problem with the way your tracks are laid out. Suggest you post a fairly close-up screen shot of your track layout where the individual tracks (including text) are clearly identified. Your first screen shot doesn’t give sufficient detail.

wwaag

[Wayne Waag]

Given the age of your system, I’m not sure if a new video card would be available except perhaps on Ebay. Perhaps someone else could chime in. If you “must” live with your current system, there may be some things you can do to improve preview performance. I was forced to do a 3-camera HD project on an old Core 2 Duo laptop earlier this year. Probably, the main thing is your choice of proxy. Even though my source footage was 1080 60P AVCHD, I rendered proxies at 720 60P using MPEG-2 at a fairly low bit rate–a format that doesn’t require a great deal of computing power. You might even consider a lower resolution proxy. You might also do selective short pre-renders just to see the effects of your framing and/or color correction. When doing a preview, make sure that the Video scopes are turned off since they require quite a bit compute power, even on pretty high end systems.

I just read John Rofrano’s post and I concur completely with his assessment. You really would save yourself a lot of time and frustration by upgrading.

wwaag

[Wayne Waag]

Would a dedicated graphics card improve my resolution so I can view my preview screen in the PREVIEW Quarter mode (or better)?

Your system specs are way, way under-powered for any serious editing you may want to do with DSLR footage. A new graphics card may help some, but it would most likely be minimal. If at all possible, give some serious thought to upgrading. There are lots of threads here and on the Vegas Pro forum that can be helpful.

wwaag

[Wayne Waag]

I’d prefer to have it be rapid and be over with in five, maybe ten seconds.

Unless I really missed something, do you realize that what you’re asking for is pretty much impossible? Do the math. For a video rate of 60fps, each frame is roughly 17 msec in duration. Counting backward from 3650 to 0 in 10 sec–each number would be displayed in less than 3 msec. That means roughly 6 numbers displayed for each frame. Even if you could do this, all you would see is a complete blur. Again, I may have missed something, but if not, you need to re-think what you’re trying to accomplish.

wwaag

[Wayne Waag]

There is just one thing I am struggling with: the settings for the preview screen. If I use preview > auto, the footage has a sharp contrast. Any tips?

Preview is so dependent upon your system specs. Obviously, the best would be Best/Full, if your system is sufficiently capable. I found that Preview/Full works best for viewing 2.7K 60P footage on my system. Even though I have a dual monitor system, I’ve also found that preview performance improves when restricted to a single screen, which for me at least, is sufficient for basic cuts editing. Again, it’s all dependent upon your particular system. Experiment to see what works best for you.

wwaag

[Wayne Waag]

[William Diels]

So, if I understand correctly, an upgrade to Vegas Pro 13 build 453 should allow me to work with the GoPro mp4 files in Vegas Pro 13 without having to convert them first?

Yes. It works well for me for 2.7K 60P and 4K 30P footage, so I presume it would be even less taxing for less resolution such as 1080 60P. Suggest you download the trial version and see if it works for you.

wwaag