Why has DVD Architect failed to pick up audio?

[John Rofrano]

[Mike Green] “Yet I am perplexed, and I wonder if anyone may shed light on this mystery, as to why Architect ignored the audio from a video file, when it had never done so in the past. The fact that the footage was imported from a camcorder must have something to do with the reason, I suppose, buy why?”

What codec did the audio use? DVD Architect was probably expecting uncompressed PCM audio in an AVI wrapper.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Mike Green]

Thank you, John, I appreciated your taking the time to respond. I wish I were as much of a video wizard as many here undoubtedly are, but codec detection is a very weak suit on my end. Right-clicking on the giant .AVI file predictably provided no answer, and the next best thing I had in my computer is a CODEC Detective program called “Sherlock” – but that only informs about which codecs are installed on the computer, far as I can figure.

If your lead lies at the crux of the problem, isn’t it strange that the video produced by a SONY Mini-DV Handycam would present difficult terrain for a program like Architect?

[Rob Franks]

What audio output were you set for in DVDa?

[Rob Franks]

Sorry… the reason I ask is because of this:

“I have tried converting the .AVI to a .WMV, and the audio was ignored once again. Finally, I Vegas’ed the clip into the separate MPEG-2/AC3 components, and that did the trick.”

DVDa does not contain a AC3 encoder (The licensing for AC3 is in DVDa while the actual encoder is in Vegas) so if you had it set for AC3 that would explain no audio at the output

[John Rofrano]

MiniDV cameras should be using PCM audio. You can download a free program called GSpot and open the file in there and it will tell you all about the codec used. It should look something like this:

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

[Rob Franks] “DVDa does not contain a AC3 encoder (The licensing for AC3 is in DVDa while the actual encoder is in Vegas) so if you had it set for AC3 that would explain no audio at the output”

Actually I don’t beleive this is correct. If you buy Vegas without DVD Architect you don’t get an AC3 encoder at all. The encoder is delivered with DVD Architect and can then be used in Vegas. I believe DVD Architect will encode to AC3 just fine.

I can’t test this because my DVD Architect is not working but if you test it I think you’ll see that it works.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Rob Franks]

“Actually I don’t beleive this is correct.”
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To be dead honest John… I’m not absolutely sure either way. I know that BOTH vegas and dvda must be installed on your machine for ac3 to work, which SUGGESTS that one has the operations while the other holds the key.

[Rob Franks]

Sorry… I will also add that I know DVDa also has the ability to re-compress an EXISTING ac3 file to specs if it is non compliant. But I’m not so sure (and let me be clear that I have not tested this)DVDa has the ability to CREATE a ac3 file from from nothing but a couple a wav files (or similar).

[Tom Keane]

John,

Thanks a million for the GSpot awareness. That’s a great tool.

Tom

[John Rofrano]

[Tom Keane] “Thanks a million for the GSpot awareness. That’s a great tool.”

Yea, and down on the lower left are the buttons [1] and [2]. These can be used to see if the file plays. Pressing [1] will show you the chain of filters that will be used to play it and button [2] will actually attempt to play it.

I used those two buttons to debug a problem once where Nero was causing DV AVI files not to play in Boris RED because it inserted it’s own filter into my DV video chain that conflicted with RED. I uninstalled Nero and everything worked again and I would never, ever, never install another Nero product again. Way too intrusive inserting filters where they should not be!

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com