What am I doing wrong rendering HDV in Vegas
 

I have an HDV PAL project. When I rendered the project which was 2 hours
long. the final output was only 8 GB, which is really small for a 2 hr project.
I thought the final output would be about 26 GB.
My render settings for HDV to DV PAL Widescreen are

1) MPEG-2
2) Template DVD Architect PAL Widescreen
3) Video Render quality was changed to Best on the template
4) I changed the Bit Rate to 8,000,000 Constant
5) I included the Audio Stream.

Does this make any sense for the file size to be this low before I
burn to DVD?

Thanks in advance for any help .

By rendering to the DVD Architect template, you are rendering to SD for burning onto a DVD. Without changing the bitrate, 8Gig sounds reasonable. If you're burning on a standard DVD-r/+r, though, it needs to be even lower as they can only hold about 4.3 Gig of information. Of course then you have dual-layer DVDs and then the actual HD varieties.

If you wanted around 26Gig for 2 hours, you'd need to render to an HD MPEG transport stream (m2t file) instead.

Thanks Edward, I am still in AVI land and have not done the the DVD Template to MPEG2 before. And I do use dual-layer DVD to get the best picture from the big file. And not too many People can copy my DVD's because of the dual-layer.
The same project I want to burn on Blu-Ray, what is the best way to render HDV file on Vages to Blu-Ray? Is it Mpeg2 with HDV-50I Template ?

Thanks

A-unless your vids are longer than 60 mins, you're gaining nothing by higher bitrate; anything higher than 9.5Mbps won't read on some players.

B-Don't disillusion yourself for a second about dual-layer being any more or less difficult than a single layer to extract/rip/steal. The process is identical in either event.

C-To render for BD/Blu-ray, use the BluPrint template in the MPEG render options.

Thanks Douglas,

My Video is 120 mins long and I used 8 mbps, but is there any more or less quality of your video with higher bitrate or is it just putting more data on the Disk.
I know anyone can steal from a dual-layer DVD but not your average customer, I get a lots of calls from people trying to copy from one drive to another and failed thinking something wrong with my DVD.

Thanks

PS. I have your Vegas training 4,5 and 6 and I hope you have one coming for Vegas 7 and Vegas 8 when it is released. We need more info on HDV workflow.