Burning DVD Video With Sony Vegas and DVD Architect

There are many solutions for burning out high quality DVDs, and with the new
High Definition players on the market some new tricks to be learned. The two
software packages which can burn HD-DVD -- that I know -- are Sony's Vegas w/
DVD Architect and the Ulead Video Studio 10+. I recently got a chance to work
with the Sony Vegas tool kit and found it an amazing package for editing DVD
quality video as well as a nuts-and-bolts solution for putting together professional
quality DVD's (standard and high-def).

There are cheaper and even free packages out there in the open-source world
which will edit video, but nothing I've found which is currently up-to-par with
the software on the market side. For years I used Adobe's Premier and found
it lacking in many ways, but it was the best thing out there, and so you did
what you could. Then Ulead VideoStudio came along and that is a good package;
not quite what I was looking for but the price was right, and it was better
than the more expensive Premier. Now that I have the Sony Vegas system however,
all bets are off. The price was a bit high, but the hours it has saved, and
the quality of the product it can create paid for itself in three projects time.

When you are capturing HDV with Sony Vegas, it comes in as M2T format, which
is a highly compressed variant of the MPEG-2 format, and native HDV cameras.
The quality at this point is virtually unchanged and the data rate is no higher
than that of regular DV so capture isn't an issue. Sony Vegas allows you to
edit at this quality, but really there aren't readily available computers with
enough processing power to edit the M2T files effectively. The solution is to
use an intermediate file, perform your edits and adjustments and then swap out
the intermediate for the original footage. All of your edits, adjustments and
processing such as color correction etc. are transferred to the original footage
for final render. It really is an amazing package.

Even with the intermediary code, you are probably going to want a machine with
at least a 2.6 Ghz or faster processor, and 1gig of RAM.

Once we are done with our editing, and have our finished product, we want to
burn a SD DVD. Vegas comes with a very good MainConcept MPEG encoder which will
do the down-conversation for us before we bring the files into DVD Architect.
For SD DVD we are going to be converting down to SD 720x480. There are some
advantages to smart rendering HDV, but for our purposes we are going for an
SD DVD so these don't come into play right now.

To render the video we are going to use the template “DVD Architect NTSC
Widescreen video stream”. Set the bitrate based on the length of the video,
like with any SD Mpeg render. In the custom tab, under project, set the Video
Rendering Quality to “Best”. This is unrelated to the Mpeg bitrate
setting, and instead effects what method Vegas uses when rescaling the video.
When you are changing the image size (which we are down to 720x480) it is important
to select “Best” for this option.

For the Audio, we want to use the AC3 format, rather than wave or MP3.

Make sure the timeline for the project set to 1080i HDV, for the best quality,
if you have it set to NTSC Widescreen, instead of HDV 1080i you will get very
soft images. Another trick for crisping up the images is to add a very mild
Unsharp Mask filter to your timeline.

The last thing we want to make sure of is that we set, in the Project Properties,
the deinterlace method to "Blend Fields". While you are not deinterlacing
when downconverting like this, if that setting is set to "none" the
output looks rather hideous.

Now, we set the rendering process, and when we bring our files into DVD Architect
it won't have to re-render those files before burning and we will have the best
quality we can get out of a SD DVD burn.

Intermediary Codec:

I may have lost you back there when I just glossed over this concept. At some
point you just have to push on through and clean up later, so let's go over
a few items before we get to editing and burning our next movie.

The HDV transport stream coming in from your HDV camera is much to heavy to
process, so we use what is called an Intermediary codec so we can edit files
with computer own by mere mortals. It is a translation or an "in-between"
codec. Connect HD (for Sony Vegas) Aspect HD (for Adobe Premiere) and Lumiere
(for Final Cut Pro) are all intermediary codecs. You capture in either native
MPEG from the HDV camera, and the video is converted to the intermediary either
in real time after capture, or during capture. When you render to print to tape,
if you wish to print to your HDV camera, the intermediary will re-convert the
intermediate stream to the MPEG format once again, providing you with a great
image. Now you might be thinking that you are going to loose some quality during
this process, but the fact is that if you don't use an intermediary codec and
edit the raw MPEG transport stream directly, you could loose a significant amount
of quality in the process.

The audio format for HDV is MPEG 1 Audio layer II, which has a bitrate of 384
kbps and can be very good quality, but not if we want to edit the tracks. So
again, it is best to send this to the intermediary as well (which is done automatically
for you with the video). Something that might surprise you is that he sound
tracks in HDV are not at the same level as CD standards. DV camcorders record
audio in PCM format, which is basically as good as a .wav file. HDV's audio
spec is more in line with a very high bitrate MP3 audio. When you use the Cineform
intermediary, audio is converted to a 48K/16 bit format, so you won't need to
worry about the audio quality in editing.

The Sony Vegas package really does give you everything you need to create and
produce professional quality video files and DVDs. Again the price can seem
rather daunting, but for the ease of use, and quality of the tools, it is well
worth the price tag, and the short learning curve.