Idea Question on performace of DVDA version 7.

Hi Derek, I have just finished a large project for one of my sons. I burnt the 1920x1080 50i MPEG 2 Wave 64 footage to two Blu-ray disks & was a bit disappointed in the 'Prepare' and burn times. I noticed the CPU performance was only 15% in 'Prepare' & single figure percentages in the burn mode, see attached pic's. I have an all SSD hard drive setup and a i7-6700k CPU at 4Ghz & 32GB of RAM. During encoding the CPU was running at 97%. Have you any comment or tips to improve times?

Hi Eagle Eye

During encoding the CPU was running at 97%.

Are you talking about rendering the video with Vegas Pro/Vegas Movie Studio/or DVD Architect ?

Idea #1
The massive Preparation time, seems to be indicating that your video (if it was prepared with Vegas Pro or Vegas Movie Studio first), is being re-rendered with DVD Architect. If that is what happened, you need to check your DVD Architect Project Properties and make sure they match the Video and Audio properties out of Vegas Pro/Vegas Movie Studio. If one setting is out, it will re-render the entire video, which you don't want to happen.

Make sure your DVDA Project Properties look exactly like this.
Note that .WAV audio means using PCM setting.




Idea #2
If your video and project settings were matched perfectly, it may be something to do with the type of Blu-ray discs you used to burn with.
You mentioned that the project is very large.
How large is the project in total time ?
Did you use 25GB single layer Blu-ray discs or 50GB dual layer discs ?

The last time I burnt a long video to Blu-ray, it did take a very long time to create.
I worked out that the bottleneck was the actual type of Blu-ray discs I was using.
My DVD/Blu-ray burner was only operating at 2x speed, which meant the disc took over an hour to burn.

Idea #3
I have not made any projects with DVD Architect 7 yet.
There are some bugs with this version, which everyone is waiting to be fixed.
So there may be a new bug which is causing the problem.
It might be a good idea to post your message on the official Vegas Forums and see if other people are experiencing the same problem.
www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/

Once I find out how long your project is and what size discs you are using, I will perform a duplicate test on my end and report back how long the prepare time takes.

Don't forget File/Optimize Disc will tell you what is required to be recompressed. Very useful.

If the video you prepared is too big to fit on the disc, DVDA is going to re-compress the entire video (re-render) and if that happens, it is going to take a very long time to do.

If this is the actual problem, I recommend re-rendering your video with Vegas first and use Custom Bit Rate Settings, to make sure it is small enough to fit on the disc without re-compression.

I use this online Bit Rate Calculator when making Blu-ray discs.
This calculator assumes you are using MPEG2 for Blu-ray settings and not Sony AVC.
dvd-hq.info/bitrate_calculator.php

Reference your extensive & much appreciated reply:-
a) I was referring to my Vegas Pro 14 project, which was rendered to MPEG2 1920x1080 50i & Wave 64 audio. The figures on CPU usage during authoring was when I first authored to a BD-RE 2X but the subsequent authoring to BD-R 6X disks was much the same.
b) In reply to #Idea 1. I checked the properties in that DVDA 7 project and they are identical to your recommended data.
c) In reply to Idea 2. My total Vegas Pro 14 project was first created by splitting into two separate projects one occupied 84% of a 25GB Blu-ray disk and the other 57%. In each case the properties are the same. The little camera my son used was a small Panasonic camera in which it recorded to AVC 1920x1080 and AC-3 audio. When I rendered it finally in Vegas Pro 14 it was converted to MPEG 2 & Wave 64. I use Verbatim 25G 6X disks.
d) The rendered size of the video file only in part 1 of the project is 18.4GB, and the second part video file is 12.4GB to give you some idea.

Finally just to make my request for comment clear, I have sucessfully completed the two disks and the son is very happy with them. My main concern was the powerful CPU not being utilised more during the authoring operation, cheers.

Eagle eye. wrote: Finally just to make my request for comment clear, I have successfully completed the two disks and the son is very happy with them. My main concern was the powerful CPU not being utilised more during the authoring operation, cheers.

I am not a software engineer, so don't know how DVDA works internally.
I recommend you ask this question about CPU utilization on the official Vegas Forums for DVD Architect.
I'm sure someone there will have the inside knowledge on what is meant to be normal.
My guess is that because DVDA is based on such old code now, that it can't take advantage of modern high powered CPUs.
www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/add-ons-forum/

If you get a good answer, please report back here so we can learn as well.

Below just a couple of threads/discussions from the old SCS DVD Architect forum (even though you don't mention low memory issues) that may or may not be of interest.
here and here

I've only burnt two Blu-ray discs. It takes time to have enough videos to fill up 25gb! I recall the preparation took a while even though only my audio needed recompressing from Dolby to LPCM.

But I got the impression that DVDA Studio 5 was copying the files twice? Firstly to create files ready for the disk and then to copy these into the final iso file. This copying took time.