Editing DVD ready MPG (that was converted from DV-AVI)

[Martin Bannet]

Hi everyone! New to the board.

Gave away me ol' SONY-MiniDV (HC-12) but had all the Sony Vegas Captured video stored on a spare hard-drive.

9 tapes of converted AVI type video sitting on the hard drive was just too much space hogging. So using a batch converter (ULEAD) I readied all the AVI's for DVD by rendering them all to DVD-NTSC format. I checked 'High Quality' and 2-Pass Encode in the batch command gui's and am pretty happy with the results - virtually undetectable loss from AVI to DVD ready NTSC video.

Before I went to do any cutting/fading of several video clips using VEGAS 8, I decided to do a test: I re-rendered one of the videos that had been converted by ULEAD to what I hoped would be the exact same format (as per the drop-down menu found in Vegas when you go to render). The file size it rendered the converted-MPEG video was LESS than the original ULEAD converted MPEG file. Any idea why? I opted for high quality video - 16x9 - 2-pass encoding but it ended up about 20 Megabytes less from the original 50Mb file when re-rendered with Vegas.

Using GSPOT.EXE, I have posted the stats of the avi to mpg converted file for someone to analyze so that I can do a proper matchup in Vegas (v.8) for editing and re-rendering for a DVD.

Size: 52.1 MB (or 53,402 KB or 54,683,648 bytes)
Container: DVD "VOB" format
MPEG-2 Program Stream ,, {1 vid, 1aud }
Sys Bitrate: 10080 kb/s VBR
Len: 0:47.848
Frms: 1,434
kbps: 7443
Qf: .719
Pic/s: 29.970
Frames/s: 29.970
Fields: 59.940
-------------------
w x h : 720 x 480
-------------------
SAR: 1.500 (3:2)
PAR: 1.185
DAR: 1.778 (16:9)
-------------------
AUDIO - Codec : DVD_LPCM_AUDIO

When trying to re-render the same file in VEGAS here's what differences GSPOT.EXE states about the file:

Container: Now shows Sys Bitrate of 9921.kb/s VBR
Audio: Shows CODEC change to MPEG-1 Layer 2 (CBR)
info 0xc0:480000Hz 224 kb/s tot , Stereo

Kbps NOW shows 5963 and the Qf is 0.576

EVERYTHING else seems to be the same.

Should I worry that Vegas wants to reset (what appears to be only) the audio to these altered and lower bitrates? I only care that the video is not sacrificed ANY MORE than it has been from converting it from avi to mpeg (DVD ready) format.

Your input is greatly appreciated - memories are important - wouldn't want to mess them up in any way.

Thanks so much!

Martin