Just my two cents...

If you absolutely can't get it to work, and you have the hard drive space, render out an uncompressed avi (or use a lossless compression on your avi, like huffyuv) and then let DVDA do the work for you. You'll avoid a lossy intermediate, and you won't have to spend all day mucking about with rendering and rerendering over and over until it works...

I think Brian said he doesn't have DVDA so he won't be looking at it's estimate. If he's going straight from Vegas to Nero, I don't know if Nero will accept an intermediate avi - does Nero have an mpeg2 encoder?
I don't think Nero will do menus will it? (I can't say, I've never used it to author, just to burn)
I agree to check the audio format, but I also don't know if you can use ac3 audio with a dvd Nero will prepare?

IMO Nero isn't the best option to author dvds and if it will encode mpeg2, I wouldn't think it would have the best encoder either.
Maybe someone with more experience with Nero can answer.

I hadn't caught that, Kyle.

Brian, WHAT are you using to author the DVD????

Hey guys, sorry for the lag in my response to all of your input. I don't have DVDA yet, (looking to upgrade now though) so I'm using Nero 6.0 to author and burn my dvd. I am using several (8 or 9) motion menus as well as some background music. I've adjusted according for these additions, but to no avail. I have resorted to rendering an MPEG at a paltry 4kbs. The final result is OK, but I'd like to get a little higher bit rate w/out sacrificing my animated menus or music bed. Maybe it's a pipe dream, I don't know. I'm upgrading to DVDA as soon as my wife will let me!!! lol!
Thanks for the help with this fellas.

Oh yeah almost forgot...It's Nero that is telling my file is too big. And this is before I create any menus or the music bed. I render out my video to an MPEG at about 3.8 Gigs and when I load that into Nero, Nero says it's too large to fit on a standard DVD. I think it says the file is 5+ Gigs which I know is not true. I'm truely befuddled with this and am getting DVDA ASAP! God love acronyms!!!

8 or 9 motion menus? That could be doing it, but I don't know what bitrate Nero is using to encode them (who knows, it could be 8000kbps/PCM).

I typically take the length all of my footage (main feature, bonus material, motion menus) and add it all together. Then I use the total time to calculate my target bitrate (estimating a bit low to leave some room for error).

How long are the motion menus? 30 seconds each is my usual target (just let them loop). I can't imaging that they're accounting for an extra gig of data, but who knows what stunts Nero is pulling in the background.

As for DVDA, I've never used it, but I'm sure it'll work better for you than Nero. I use DVD-Lab and love it.