I am having a hell of a time understanding the way Vegas renders. I have a wedding video of 2.5 hours. I normally used to render to MPEG - 2 however I am not happy with the video quality loss. I used the following template this time around;

NTSC DV template, .avi for windows.

I left all settings default and my finished file turned out to be 32 gig....Oh my GOD...Is that normal?????? I was assuming the file to be around 6-7 gig max... Can someone advise please as I am in a jam...

One other question, will DVD achitech prepare av .avi file of 32 gig? If it will, can I use a product like DVD shrink to get the file down to 4.7 or less?

Please read this background to DVD encoding: http://www.videoforums.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=380

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32 gig sounds right for the length of the file you have encoded using those settings.

Try useing the Main Concept 2 template with the DVD NTSC settings.

Dvd Architect will bring that down when it encodesd to mpeg2 however Architect uses the same render engine as vegas so you will prob see the same results. Architect is a lil slower though.

Is your source material also NTSC? if not this could be why you are getting such a dramatic loss in quality.

The best MPEG2 encoder in my experience is Quicktime Pro. For £20 odd quid its worth paying for. However I have always found Vegas to be fine.

I'd use Vegas to render using quicktimes settings.
When encoding to mpeg2 you can sometimes expect a bit of loss in quality because MPEG2 is a hugely compressed format.

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