-
HD to DV Conversion issues
Apologies if this is in the wrong forum; I’m new to this. I also appreciate that similar questions have been asked before. But I have spent weeks, and many long nights trying to solve this, and I am tearing my hair out in despair. Please treat me gently as I find the technical stuff quite difficult.
I have a project in HDV which has been selected for a film festival. The deadline is tomorrow but I have begged for an extension. It’s only ten minutes long and I want it to be as good as possible. I output it from FCP using the default settings, and use compressor to create the MPEG2 and sound file. So far so good. Then I try and create the DVD in DVD Studio. If I view it in the playback window it’s fine and the DVD plays fine on my Mac. But when I play it in the DVD player I get errors. I’ve tried different settings; like self-contained and not, lowering the bit rate, selecting the bottom channel only, drop frames, recreating the quicktime file in H.264 and creating the DVD in iDVD and whatever I do I still get the same problems.
I’m using a domestic DVD player attached to the TV to test it and this is where it all goes wrong. The symptoms are quite erratic. Sometimes the DVD fails to load at all; the DVD player whirrs as if it’s trying to find the movie but can’t, and then sometimes I have to do a forced eject to get the DVD out again. Other times it gets part-way through and then sticks and the motion goes juddery and frames are dropped.
I’m beginning to think I am going to have to spend thousands on a hardware device to create my DVD; or recreate the entire film in DV or take it to a commercial place. But I am getting short of time and other people don’t seem to get these problems.
I am beginning to wonder whether I’m doing anything wrong at all; is it possible that there could be something wrong with the DVD player to make it play commercial DVDs ok but not mine? It doesn’t make any sense. I also wondered if R/W DVDs degrade if they are re-used several times. This hypothesis means that I have got through rather a lot recently.
Has anyone got any ideas? -
1 Reply
-
Woohooo! It’s OK folks I have solved it myself. Isn’t it funny how articulating a problem so others can understand it can remove your own blinkers? I was so fixated with thinking it was my inability to use the software that I wasn’t thinking outside the box. Until I had to spell it out, then it became obvious.
The problem? Cheap RW DVDs. Switched to high quality DVD+R and it’s worked a dream. 🙂
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up