Rats. Ok, thanks, Edward. I understand now. Just shows my lack of experience with DVD authoring. Will have to come up with something else to put under it.

To speed up preview, it helps to pre-render sequences to RAM. Obviously, this takes one heckuva a lot of RAM, depending on the length of the preview, the more the better. 512 Megs is too low to get an effective result. I suggest 1 Gig min.

Why is this preview speed so important? I do all editing priort to
any effects work and that plays full frame rate on my system with
simple cutting and cross-fading and every other cutting tool.

Then I move on to effects and color correction work and this might
indeed get things slow downed to 5 fps. But this is not a problem
for me. I don't need to see the timing of shots anymore, just how
it looks. And this I usually want to do on a frame by frame basis
anyway to see if it looks great across the whole shot.

If I really need to judge some section I'm working on I select
that section and render a ram preview (which is fast on just a
scene for example) and I can watch it play at full framerate.

I'm just wondering why that is important to you...

But the faster the (single) processor the faster your preview will be.

<<<-- Originally posted by Bill Ravens : To speed up preview, it helps to pre-render sequences to RAM. Obviously, this takes one heckuva a lot of RAM, depending on the length of the preview, the more the better. 512 Megs is too low to get an effective result. I suggest 1 Gig min. -->>>

512 Mb of RAM are just for the net render CPUS, which won´t need too much to do their job.

Thank you again Ed. I'm heading over to your link now.

well vegas will only allow for one other render module.. not two..

so youll have the project on one machine and have that connected to the other.

these days fo rthe price of tthe celery, a lil it more will get u a p4.2.4 or 2.8 with HT

as for you rmain unit, the more ram (and the faster the ram) the faster your render will be

u could always try Maestro if u have a spare 30 grand .. :)

what im tryin to do is set up a clip action after a button is pressed and before the chapter begins..

still having issues with that after al this time.. lol

Quantity of ram really doesn't make a lot of difference in render time UNLESS you're using a bunch of large images. That's not to say that more ram isn't useful.

The faster the processor and the faster the data paths, the faster the render will be.

With network rendering, Vegas allows the base machine and TWO network renderers so up to three machines can be rendering a single project at the same time (unless you buy more licenses).

<<<-- Originally posted by Peter Jefferson : what im tryin to do is set up a clip action after a button is pressed and before the chapter begins..

still having issues with that after al this time.. lol -->>>

This is very doable in DVDA2. You just need to point your menu button to the intermediary video. Then set the end action of that video clip to the real chapter point.

Degradation after rendering
 

Hi.

After rendering, I get sporadic spots on the parts of the video that I've processed - color correction, color curves, even fades to black (are these the infamous artifacts?)
Is there a way to avoid/get rid of them? (I want to apply other filters but I'm afraid that's going to degrade the video even more)
(the project was taped at 24p)

Thank You

Glen,
I've had experience with this earlier this year. I've spend hours and hours comparing different tests on a big tv-screen. The way that worked best for me (without motion problems or some shadow-ghosting problems) was the following:
- capture all PAL footage in a DV PAL Vegas project
- make all edits you want
- render the results to a single PAL AVI file, using the Best render quality options
- open a new, empty NTSC DV project and import the rendered PAL file onto the timeline
- check the PAL video on the timeline for it's properties, it has to be PAL
- render to an MPEG2 NTSC file using the Vegas presets (renderquality at Best).
- burn an NTSC dvd using the NTSC MPEG2 file.

Watch out with 25P footage (DVX100). I asked for and got several advices for trying to keep the progressive look towards the NTSC material, but all setting combinaties I tried in Vegas gave problems. In one of the two render steps described above I changed the 25P/progessive into interlaced (lower field). This solved the conversion artifacts (motion/ghosting). The NTSC dvd still has got the progressive look and the quality is fairly good. The only thing I notice that the video is a bitter smoother in it's motion, due to the higher number of frames/second with NTSC.

Audio quality after DVD burn
 

Anyone notice that the audio sounds sort of hollow, almost mono-like after burning to DVD? This is for Vegas 4 with DVDA 1.

I rendered the project as an NTSC DVD MPEG-2 default template with audio stream. The audio later gets recompressed as AC-3 stereo during the prepare and burn process. When I test the DVD on a DVD player and TV, the audio sounds noticeably less "full" than a commerical DVD or even just regular broadcast TV. I've double checked every setting and made sure I was encoding in stereo, but it still sounds very flat to me. I even tried PCM stereo in one burn. I also realize I'm dealing with TV speakers, but again, broadcast TV sounds much much fuller than the DVD's I've burned.

Is this is a limitation of the software MPEG encoding? Any thoughts?

Render the audio to AC3 from VEGAS and use that audio file in DVDA1. Here's what's happening in your procedure:

1) Original audio is compressed to MPEG2
2) MPEG2 audio is decompressed
3) decompressed audio is recompressed to AC3

That's a lot of extra compression. Turn off the audio in the MPEG2 file (which is the default) and render the audio to AC3 direcly in Vegas. Either that, or give DVDA an AVI file instead and let it compress both.

Thanks for the quick reply. I tried giving DVDA an avi just now and I'm still getting a hollow sound compared to broadcast TV audio. The DVD menus background music sounds the same way. Maybe I need to do some audio sweetening in Vegas? Currently the only thing I adjust with in-camera audio or music files is levels. Any thoughts?

first, you need a common basis for comparison between the finished dvd and the raw .wav audio from the .avi... that should be happening with your editing setup, where you should have quality speakers to use.

i would also be looking at the details of the .ac3 that you are encoding... what is the bitrate, what filtering do you have turned on with the .ac3 encoder, etc... don't ever encode anything without knowing exactly what the encoder settings are.