Hi... I finally got my new hard drive so I have enough space to generate my
movie now (I hope.) And then to burn it to a DVD.

Rendering it to MPEG is going to take "forever" as far as I can calculate
(it's about 1.5 hours of video) but it is comprised of 25 smaller
"vignettes" which provides natural breaks. It is my intention for the
entire movie to play through and I don't think I will provide a menuing
system to get to these mini-movies individually but I will create a chapter
at the start of each of them so a viewer can skip forward and backward
through them.

I would like to confirm my assumption that it isn't necessary to render the
entire thing to a single MPEG file right? Can I (using Vegas 4.0) render
them to MPEG individually and then string them together with DVD authoring
software?

And out of curiosity does this play "seamlessly" meaning if I render a
single long chunk into two MPEGs and set them up properly in the authoring
software of course, will they play without a pause or anything noticeable?

Thanks,
Tom

"mikep76" <sandyprice@msn.com> wrote...

Well this is actually good news :-) I'm using Vegas as my editor but I
don't have the DVD version so I'm not using it for authoring.

I also found a Toshiba site http://www3.toshiba.co.jp/dvd/e/whats/index.htm
that gave quite a nice overview of the "innards" of a DVD. Not too
technical and plenty of introductory information. After reading that it
seems clear that the physical number of files should not be an issue. They
mention "program chains" which can be set up to use the same video but to
present a different version (like a Director's Cut) without having to
completely duplicate the video.

Re: MyDVD I find it extraordinarily lame. I only have the intro version but
I'm pretty certain the upgrade editions have the same limitation. The
"play" button is centered on the screen and it cannot be moved. I'm not
just complaining mind you, I just find it ironic that it takes only 10
minutes to determine "this simply won't do." Everybody beta testing it must
have asked what's the deal here? :-)

"Tom Leylan" <gee@iamtiredofspam.com> wrote:
The DVD authoring software I have used make each MPEG file a separate
title, which does not playback seamlessly. However, I have successfully
rendered and encoded several pieces separately, joined them in TMPGEnc's
MPEG joiner, and successfully authored a DVD that played seamlessly.