Vegas to DVD Architect rendering question

Viscount Omega

Viscount Omega

Carbonite Member
Hi, I'm testing out a Blu-ray render for DVD Architect 6.0. I have a 90 minute video file I rendered using the Vegas template:

Blu-ray 1920x1080-24p, 25mbps stream. It created a mpeg2 file with extension .m2t

I used default settings except:

Frame rate 23.976 (same as I shot it in)
High quality video=31
Variable bit rate default (30, 25 avg, 20mbps)
I checked "two pass" setting
rendering quality=best

I unchecked the boxes for creating the audio stream so I have none.

The resulting video file is 19 GB. (It took 26.5 hours to render. LOL.)

The blank disc I have is 25GB capable.

When I load the file into DVD Architect for Blu-ray creation, then prepare, it says the file will be compressed. Not re-compressed, mind you. Don't I want it to not be compressed? If so, what am I doing wrong?

If I hit "fit to disc" under "optimize" it still only takes up 63% of the disc.
 
I just did a quick experiment by rendering again and choosing "save as elementary streams" and I get a file with an .m2v extension that does not need to be compressed in DVD Architect. It also shows a higher bit rate than the previous file (25mbps vs. 18mbps). Not sure what's going on. Need to investigate.

Edit: Ok, DVD Architect says my .m2t file is not compliant with the disc media. That's why it wanted to recompress. (although it didn't say recompress, it just said it will be "compressed". Whatever.

Looking at Sony's AVC vs. the Main Concept .m2v files--they both work fine--and they look the same to me when I A/B them. AVC seems about 25% smaller. Maybe more efficient.
 
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I don't use Vegas or DVD Architect but I do have quite a bit of experience authoring BluRay. If at all possible, you should use h264 instead of MPEG2. You'll get better results at a lower bit rate.
 
There are 3 different types of Blu-ray codec templates in Vegas 13 to choose from: Main Concept AVC/AAC, Main Concept MPEG-2, and Sony AVC/MVC. They all work without recompression in DVD Architect as long as I keep the bit rate under 28mbps. They all look the same in quality to me (although I didn't pixel peep). I don't care about fast render times for this. Just the highest quality.

Common sense would indicate that a higher bit rate=higher quality but that might not be true if a new algorithm made a codec more efficient at a lower bit rate.

I wish there was some consensus about which is best.
 
Andrius Simutis said:
If at all possible, you should use h264 instead of MPEG2. You'll get better results at a lower bit rate.
Andrius Simutis said:
Better codec trumps higher bit rate. Better compression software trumps higher bit rate too.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

I second that. H264 over Mpeg2 all the way.
Also, what I (personally) would do, would be to output a "Master" video. Let's say you simply render a video out of your NLE with codecs like DNxHD from Avid (excellent compression and easier than H264 to playback) or ProRes from Apple. From there, you work with that "Master" video to compress to bluray or DVD with other compression software. Best way for me since a couple years.

VidCoder is an excellent software to compress to H264 for bluray. That's the one I use and with specific settings, the results are really great. Compressing a video from DNxHD to H264 in Vidcoder goes usually at around 30fps (on my AMD x4 Phenom).
If you're interested, I can send you the .xml settings file for VidCoder.
For DVD, I use HCencoder (which works with AviSynth scripts) but definitively worth it in terms of compression quality.


EDIT: and to have used Sony Vegas 8.0 back in the time, and tried more recent version since, I can tell you that the built-in encoder of Sony isn't bad, but it can't compare with VidCoder though.
 
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