I used a fairly slow computer for this (3y old laptop) and it created the dvd file pretty quickly (2-3 times faster than real time) so I assume it smart renderered. I used a 3rd party because studio encoding is still lacking, in fact it is both much slower and lower quality than other vendors. 

Does Studio 12/14 re-encode MPG files when making a DVD? I am talking about a DVD-Compatible MPG file created by a third=party software.  How do I know for sure? And what if I add some menus?  

I didn't use a credit card but Paypal, and my account was debited indeed.. I guess I will wait 10 days to get my copy..

last night I paid for the download upgrade + back up disc. my paypal account was charged. but I never received a link to download. on top of that I got an email telling me that studio 14 was ''back-ordered''. wtf???

 I have a rendered DV movie that's about 20 minutes. it was shot in 4x3. I used vegas and pan & crop to make an anamorphic 16:9 version of it (not letterboxed, anamorphic). Now I would like to put both version of a single disc and have the user pick on the main (root?) menu which version to play depending if they have a square TV or ...

I recently came back to editing with studio 12 after last using Studio 7 a few years back...  I started with the original Studio DV almost 10y ago and at the time my 120 MHZ Pentium / 128MB RAM could handle DV footage perfectly. Unfortunately now, my 3-year old dual-core pentium is too slow to edit hi-res AVCHD files at 1920x1080/60i (shot ...