Vegas for HDV to SD MPEG2
 

Hello from Premiere Country - I am pretty much sold to the Adobe Suite but there is something I would like to test in Vegas. I can get access to a PC running Vegas 6.

I am playing around with HDV lately and as you probably all know, the SD MPEG2/DVD export from PremPro is poor. So I was doing the resizing in VirtualDub either by frame serving uncompressed to TMPGEnc or using HuffYUV as intermediate - pretty labor intensive and time consuming process. I am wondering wether I could do the M2T to standard def MPEG2 conversion in Vegas and use the resulting files to finalize my projects in Encore DVD.

Is this possible at all? I know Vegas 6 is not the lates version, but I suppose it's new enough to work with HDV files - at this point I am not interested in CineForm, I'm happy with my workflow in PremPro 2.0. And second, does Vegas 6 handle the MPEG2 conversion at all? If yes - and someone has experience with my present workflow, how does it compare to the quality of the Vegas compression?

As mentioned above, I dunno notin' 'bout Vegas so please go easy on me...

Thanks,

Vegas 6 will do the conversion ok but if you want to do any trimmer work it's pretty clunky.

Most Vegas installs will have DVD Architect, so, Vegas will have access to the excellent Main Concept MPEG2 encoder that is bundled and integrated.

Vegas 6 is fine for what you want to do.

Encoding in Vegas rather than DVDA gives more controls of the encoder, including datarates & etc.

The resolution downconvert can be done in the same pass as the MPEG2 encode, I recommend selecting "Best" video rendering quality in the custom render settings. ("Good" is fine for all encodes without rez conversions.)

If I were doing it, I would start with:
Save as type: Main Concept MPEG2
Template: DVD Architect NTSC widescreen video stream
On the "custom" dialog:
Video Rendering Quality: Best
VBR Max: 8,000,000
VBR Avg: 6,000,000
VBR Min: 4,000,000

Then, a separate render of audio:
Save as type: Dolby Digital AC-3
Template: Default Template
on the "custom" dialog:
Dialog Normalization: -31db
Line mode profile: none
RF mode profile: none

See these threads for more info on AC3 encoding:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=47131
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=87872

See Edward Troxel's excellent newsletters for general MPEG2 encoding info:
http://www.jetdv.com