Help..movie making process...opinions please.

[jranaudo]

I want to confirm that my process for making movies is acceptable or in which way I could improve my process. The process needs to be relativly easy because I have 3 kids and not much time. As it is my wife as become pretty efficient at making the movies in vegas so thats not an issue.

Tools:
Sony Vegas Movie Studio
Sony DVD Architect Studio
TMPGEnc encoder (I like it's quality better than the MainConcept encoder included in the above)

Process:
1) Capture video using Vegas
2) Design Movie in Vegas
3) Make "uncompressed" AVI version (so I can encode in TMPGEnc)
4) Make MPEG of AVI movie for storage on home network.
-I want to use XBOX 360 to view movies on network
-I use MPEG2 for both video and audio.
--Now the more difficult work--
5) Make a video only "system" stream of my movie.
6) Make a audio (PCM) stream of my movie.
7) Create DVD project in DVDA using files created in step 5,6.

The reason I need to perform step 5-6 is because DVDA insists on "recompressing" my "mpg" movie unless I add the movie as 2 separate streams; audio + video. It also does not support m2v elementary streams which is why I have to create a "system" video stream.

The "system" video stream is nothing more that the MPG with and empty audio track as opposed to an elementary stream which is just video.

Is there a way to avoid steps 5,6? Should I use another software product for authoring my DVD? It needs to be no more complicated than DVDA because I am time constrained and my wife would need to learn it.

I understand I will only get a certain quality of video when using simple tools but the results are more than enough for my eyes and most everyone who sees the movie.

Any comments/opinions?

Thanks,

John Ranaudo
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[guns1inger]

There are a couple of thigs to try. One is the Debugmode Frameserver. If it works for Movie Studio, then you can skip the uncpompressed file stage and encode with tmpgenc directly from the Vegas timeline.

You should also check your DVD project settings, as it should not touch compliant files unless they contradict the settings.