Installation
The installation disc is a DVD, not a CD... with two software
apps
-
Vegas Movie Studio 8.0
-
DVD Architect Studio 4.5
The default installations go to:
c:\Program Files\Sony\Vegas Movie Studio
8.0
and
c:\Program Files\Sony\
DVD Architect Studio 4.5
There were no issues with
the setups, entering serial numbers, and doing online
activations/registrations...
Initial Startup... immediately followed by
the first updates
There was one DLL error message during the first
opening of Movie Studio (I said OK and kept going). The install
was followed by a notice that updates were available...
I downloaded and installed v8.0c (81 MB) and
v4.5c (58 MB).... no issues installing on top of the previous
installations, and this time there was no DLL error when opening the app
for the first time.
Main Working Window of Movie Studio
8
After a quick look, and with the aid of
some neat animated built-in help that points exactly to the icon
or button you are looking for, and all but makes the choices and presses the
buttons for you, I had...
I was looking at this timeline, previewing it in
the monitor at the lower right. All was being previewed fine... all but the text
clip, which I need to do more homework on.
That's enough for the first quick check. I don't need any real
content. It's time to turn the project into a video file.
The main menu under 'File' showed 3
possible choices... 'Make Movie...', 'Render As...', and 'Publish...' Let's
see what each offers.
-
'Make Movie..'
-
'Render As...'
-
'Publish...' 
I first opted for 'Render As...' and picked
the widescreen NTSC DV-AVI option. 
Bad choice... it happened so quickly that I almost
missed taking a snapshot... 7 seconds to get a DV-AVI
file!!! That give me much confidence that I had a good file. Good
videos take time to render.
I saw only blackness and heard nothing when I
played the saved 80 MB DV-AVI file in WMP and previewed it in Movie Maker 2.1.
The file size seemed OK but the contents were totally
missing.
The second try was to the NTSC DV option.
That one took 8-1/2 minutes to render. It was 280 MB in size and
looked great in Windows Media Player... all but the text clip which I
hadn't done right.
I took the sample into Movie Maker to annotate it
and make a
Of course the quality of a website file of 7
MB is far short of the 280 MB DV-AVI file, not to mention the starting HiDef
files... but you get the idea. The rendering worked fine.
Main Working Window of DVD Architect
Studio 4.5
I put the DV-AVI file I had just created into the
DVD menu, along with two WMV files. One was last week's holiday Photo
Story and the other was a sample file from Movie Maker... the
previews of all three looked great.
I didn't take any time to make a good
looking menu. My goal was simply to run a quick check of the full
process.
Here's a snapshot of the DVD preview in Architect
Studio.
After a little previewing, I hit the 'Make DVD' icon to do
the transcoding and burn a disc.
This was on my XP laptop. When I got the
good news note and the drive door popped open, I put the disc back in
the drive to check it in Media Center software.
It played well on my el-cheapo $29 DVD player
also.
Conclusion and Closing... and What's
Next?
Vegas Movie Studio was a pretty positive experience... here
it was Friday morning and I didn't have a newsletter topic, just this unopened
box sitting next to me for months. A few hours later I've gone from A
to Z and watched a great-looking DVD made from WMV and MOV
high def clips. Video making doesn't get much easier or better.
I now have another software package that is easy to
recommend.
Have a great week and a Happy New
Year!!
PapaJohn
