My son is submitting a film to a film festival and decided to use DVDA 5.0. He started with Pinnacle and rendered from .avi into their authoring program; footage looked good, menus were lousy. With DVDA the menus are great, but the footage looks highly compressed, especially in black areas during night scenes (shades of black blocks moving around in the corners, totally crushed blacks with no depth).

The Pinnacle mpg2 render looks cleaner than the Vegas mpg2 (MainConcept MPEG-2 DVD NTSC), but DVDA forces us to re-render the Pinnacle file before authoring.

Any ideas?

Re-render in Vegas, use the DVD Architect preset, and render the audio to AC3 separately.

How long is the film? You need to use the proper bitrate for that. Vol 1 #7 of my newsletters (http://www.jetdv.com) has full information on rendering to MPEG2. Vol 4 #1 would be another good issue to look through.

Edward,

Thanks, I'll do a little reading. The piece is 90 minutes.

I didn't realize from my previous conversations you were this serious into Vegas. After seeing your site, you are obviously more than serious. Thanks!

Edward,

Thanks, I'll do a little reading. The piece is 90 minutes.

I didn't realize from my previous conversations you were this serious into Vegas. After seeing your site, you are obviously more than serious. Thanks!


Hehe, Ed's the man when it comes to Vegas !

Paul.

That's why I love this forum; everybody pitches in to help each other out.


Ed,

Who produces the best video training materials for Vegas Pro 8?

I'll point you to this post which has many listed:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/what-happens-vegas/136344-sony-vegas-tutorials.html

If you want DVD training materials, there's some from Sony, Class On Demand, VASST, etc... but I don't like saying which one is "best". Besides, what's "best" for me may not be "best" for you.