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What are your best tips for DVD Playback success?
Hi everyone…
I’m an old hat with Vegas, but kinda new to DVDA. So I’m looking for any tips you might have to increase DVD playback success. I’ve been making DVD-R’s since 2000.
I’ve always used REELDVD, and have good luck with playback compatibility. I think that it’s time though to move on to DVDA 3.0.
I love being able to place chapters via markers in Vegas. And so far DVDA has been superb. I’m sure it will continue to impress.
I use a variety of decks to test my DVD-R’s and some will play everything and some are a little picky. Mainly the cheaper decks; these things go in circles, the cheap APEX’s used to play anything, and the expensive Pioneer’s would choke. Now it’s the cheap Chinese players that freeze up. But you never really know what that the client is going to play it on anyway.
These are the kinda of tips/techniques that I’ve used over the years to make sure the DVD-R’s I made played when they left my hands.
Video Compression. Most of my projects are under 100 minutes, so I haven’t had to really crunch anything too hard. I’ve used either the default VBR MPEG2 setting of 8,000,000 MAX – 6,000,000 AVERAGE – and 192,000 bps MINIMUM … or…
My custom tweak setting is 7,500,000 – 5,500,000 and 1,500,000. Single pass VBR.
Two Pass VBR for a project that requires a bit more care.
I usually don’t use CBR as it seems some players choke on continous high levels of material. And VBR allows for those sudden scene changes better.
Audio Compression – 224 Kbps Stereo. Either Vegas AC3 or MPEG Layer 2 when another application was to do the Dolby compression.
If a project required more overhead, I’d drop back to 192 Kbps (the default). The default will also get you a little red highlight in the Optimize Audio panel in DVDA.
I’ve always used the default DC coefficient of 9 bits, as my source material almost always has lots of movement and color changes. But this is the category that Sony/Mainconcept??? recommends to change after first experimenting with compression levels.
Using top quality media… (DVD-R’s exclusively), is absolutely critical. I used to use Mitsui/MAMA discs with my Pioneer burners, but since I’ve switched to Sony Burners I’ve had good luck with with Verbatim. I’ve always used DVD-R’s ’cause when I started that’s the kind of playback deck I told my clients to buy.
I print my disks with the EPSON 200 printer. Cheap but good. Whole lot easier than the conversion jobs I used to use.
I’ve usually rendered my projects as one long clip… but if you’ve seen my post below, I’m also open to changing that technique as well.
Another thing I do, I use the broadcast filter (legacy) as the last pass in Vegas before the final AVI rendering, it cleans up the picture and brings everything back into legal color levels. I can’t see any difference, but the computer sure can.
And I normalize the audio, and keep the peaks well away from the Red end of the scale.
If I thought it would help I’d split a potato in two and bury it under a full moon, so if anyone has some good advice, I’m listening.
Thanks,
Steve
Sony VX-1000 and others, P4 3gHz,
3000 Gigabytes Online(Not Enough), AMD64 laptop, Vegas+DVD-Architect, ReelDVD, DVFILM, Lightwave, Photoshop, Independent Production Since 1985 -
1 Reply
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Looks like you’ve pretty well covered it. Use reliable media, keep the bitrate from going too high, print on the DVD instead of using labels, etc…
Edward Troxel
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