Wow, I’m back to Windows hacking, here are some things that are going on with Windows 8.1 and Sony Vegas Platinum 11:
- Just running Make Movie is failing to render properly and reportedly doesn’t create enough for a DVD.
- The rendering is also using just 50% of processing power on a monster Core i7 4770 (what a machine that is). It turns out that we are running 32-bit Vegas Platinum (see Youtube notes) and this is because the 32-bit version has a 4 thread limit. On the Sony site is a 64-bit Vegas 11. You can change this in Options>Preferences>Video
- Also in Vegas 12, there is GPU acceleration which you have to turn on in the Render template (see the forum), but if you have an nVidia, say render if CUDA available and choose OpenGL
After a day of experimentation, it looks like there is some sort of bug with the Sony Vegas Home Studio Platinum and the LG Blu-Ray writer. It works fine with the DVD writer that is also in the machines. Ugh, another reminder of how limited hardware choice makes things more explainable.
There are two other tricks mainly because the menu authoring isn’t the same as the video editing.
- You choose Make Movie with Sony Vegas Home Platinum 11 (what a name). It automatically renders an MPEG-2 at 8Mbps average. This is enough compression for about an hour on a DVD-4.9.
- When you get to the DVD Architect, it will complain if there is more than an hour of video and then you have two choices, click on the optimize button that is at the lower left of the dialog. You also have to edit the menus as well (I had forgotten that menu authoring is a real pain with DVDs). Now when done, you choose Make DVD.
- The first step will be to “prepare” the DVD. This actually means laying out the DVD image on the hard disk.
- You will then get to a menu and it is confusing because you can’t compress. You have to click on the Video tab and then click on the recompress as YES and then click on the Autosize at the lower left and the system will automatically shrink the DVD. The maximum compression will be to about 4Mbps.
- Alternatively, you can go to Project properties and change it to a DVD-9 which is a dual layer. However, if you don’t put any chapter marks way back in Vegas, it will fail. It needs at least one chapter mark at about an hour mark, so it can make the layer change. So if you do this, you have to restart the rendering. Net, net, make sure that you have chapters every so often in the thing. DVD DL are pretty cheap right now, so I’d probably just always use them and not have to do this recompression.
- Now you go back to the make DVD menu (confusing isn’t it) and then choose Make DVD and it should then select a drive and a write speed. The Bluray burner for some reason had a driver problem and took 45 minutes and then failed. The DVD burner worked fine in 15 or so, so there are real driver problems. Didn’t really figure out how to debug these, but probably something about the peculiarities of Vegas 11 on Windows 8.1 as it has been superseded by Vegas 12.
Net, net, I haven’t made a DVD in three years, so it is nice to remember that some people still do this and rejoice in just making a single .MP4 that you can upload and not worry about all this.
