Okay, so I rendered my 70 minute project directly into Mainconcept MPG for the first time.

All prior times I've been rendering to .avi and then letting DVD Architect compress it.

I figured I would go directly to MPG so I could control the bit rate, as well as get the "enhanced for widescreen" effect that I talked about in my earlier thread.

However, 3 VERY bizarre issues came up in the final file that I'd never seen before.

1) At one point in the .VEG file I have one video event layered onto another. The one underneath is supposed to be not visible at all. For some reason in this new render, at one point the "underneath" video starts fading in for very brief moments. Almost like a double-exposed photograph. This is NOT an opacity issue and I have NEVER had this problem when rendering the same .VEG to .avi. Of course I could go through the .VEG and delete all "hidden" video events, but WHY is this happening in the first place?

2) At another point, black frames begin to shudder into frame, many times and rapidly, like you are watching the video through a strobe light. I am aware of Vegas 7's random dropped frames flaw and have had that show up in my .AVI's before, but NEVER like this, many in a row and rapidly. What gives?

3) The one that seems to bother me most, is that it seems that all my cuts have been changed to very quick fades!! This is obviously a byproduct of some kind of image compression, I am sure that I have noticed this happening slightly on previous DVD iterations of this same project, but NEVER to this extent. It is almost as if there are NO cuts anymore. If the cut is sudden, ie a jump cut or a cut to a very different image, IT LOOKS TERRIBLE. Is there something I set up wrong in the settings to create this?!

WHY OH GOD WHY AM I AFFLICTED WITH THESE PROBLEMS?!

As mentioned above, I am using Vegas 7. I am wiling to upgrade to Vegas 9 if it will fix these problems for the render (it is worth that much to me). However, if these problems aren't fixable, then is there a way that I can render to a different format (different MPG codec perhaps) and have it be (a) DVD ready (b) enhanced for widescreen (c) 24p and (d) have control over the variable bit rate?

Thanks to all for reading this lost post and I thank you in advance for any help. I'm desparate!

What is the format of the video on the timeline? Is it avi? Long-GOP?

Could you try rendering your project to .avi, drop the rendered .avi into a new Vegas project and then render that to mpeg? Also I don't understand what "enhanced for widescreen" means. If you could provide your project properties and what your rendering to we could get a better handle the specifics of your project.

What is the format of the video on the timeline? Is it avi? Long-GOP?

The timeline consists of 9 different .VEG files, layed end to end. The .VEG files themselves contain my project, comprised of mostly .m2t HDV video ingested via Vegas, and also a bit of DV, with text effects and other things generated within Vegas.

Could you try rendering your project to .avi, drop the rendered .avi into a new Vegas project and then render that to mpeg? Also I don't understand what "enhanced for widescreen" means. If you could provide your project properties and what your rendering to we could get a better handle the specifics of your project.


I could try the .AVI thing and re-drop and then render to MPG. Would the second render take as long as the first? Because the render to MPG took approximately 24 hours, and this is a somewhat time sensitive project and I cannot render it an unlimited amount of times.

When I mentioned the "enhance for widescreen", I mean that as far as I know there is no other way to get a DVD to display stretched across a widescreen television (with no letterboxing or pillarboxing) unless you render to a Widescreen MPG. Correct or not?


My original project is an HDV project, 1080 x 1440. Standard settings, I can't think of anything unusual. I rendered it to an NTSC Widescreen 24p MainConcept MPG.

This is unnerving me because I have rendered this very same project out to .AVI at least 6 times, with no errors except the 3 or 4 dropped frames over the course of the 70 minutes.

When I mentioned the "enhance for widescreen", I mean that as far as I know there is no other way to get a DVD to display stretched across a widescreen television (with no letterboxing or pillarboxing) unless you render to a Widescreen MPG. Correct or not?

Not correct. You can render to widescreen AVI and DVD Architect can properly build a widescreen DVD from that.

However, rendering straight to MPEG2 shoudl work.

What happens if you render the individual VEG files to MPEG2? DO they work individually?

Edward, how specifically do I make an AVI widescreen? I do not see an option for that.

Would it help to make the PROJECT file where all my .veg files are laid in to be widescreen DV?

Also, can anyone speak to my problem with the "fading" between scenes? This seems to be a b-frame thing... should I mess with the settings? Turn b-frames off? Or what?

I would make the project a DV-Widescreen project and the preview should appear correctly then with no letterboxes. Then render out of Vegas as MPEG 2 using the DVD Architect NTSC Widescreen video stream preset or as DV using the NTSC DV Widescreen preset.

In DVD Architect, make sure you set it up as a widescreen project and just drop the MPEG2 or DV-AVI file into the project. There should be no letterboxing.