Bill Stephan
Forum Replies Created
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Keith,
It sounds like you are doing everything correctly. When you resize smaller, you have more image data being packed into a smaller document, so there should be minimal or no loss of quality. Bicubic is the higher quality resizing algorithm.
One thing to watch out for is the resolution of the images. If your original tiff is 72dpi and you are resizing to a smaller size at 600dpi for example, you may actually be resizing larger with a corresponding loss of image quality.
Remember to always judge image quality with the document view zoomed to 100%.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Bruce,
Since Encore uses a method of constructing menus very different than that used in all other authoring software, start with one of Encore’s included sample chapter menus. Open it in Photoshop. Then you will get a sense of what the different layers do and how to set up the highlights for the buttons. Once you see how the various layers add to the final menu, I think the instructions in the help file will make much more sense.
You may find it much easier to swap your own artwork into one of the sample menus rather than constructing a new menu file from scratch, at least for the first few times.
Once the menu artwork is done, you select the target for each button (the chapter points) with the pick whip.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
If your DVD plays on a hardware DVD player, then you have achieved a correctly authored and burned DVD-R disc. If you have issues playing your DVD on a PC, then I would look at the applications being used to play the DVD on the PC.
Windows Media Player is a poor excuse for DVD player software. You may have better luck using VLC player or a software DVD player from Roxio.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
If the video is encoded in 3D side-by-side format, your 3D TV might actually recognize the 3D signal from a DVD and display it correctly. But I would test this first before trying to use do this with a real job.
We have done a few 3D Blu-ray screeners this way knowing that 3D Blu-ray requires a different encoder and codec from 2D. Some clients say these discs work, while others say they do not. It depends on the player and 3D TV.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Stephen,
If the audio person gave you a 5.1 Dolby .ac3 mix, why not use that audio file?
If your audio is 5.1 surround, then you cannot use any uncompressed audio formats. You must transcode to a 5.1 surround Dolby .ac3 file. Normally this is done using an encoder that supports transcoding from six mono audio stems. Apple Compressor will make a 5.1 surround .ac3 in this way.
The DVD Spec allows the use of PCM stereo directly on a DVD. Previous versions of Encore forced everything to transcode to .ac3 audio. I have not tried to build a DVD with PCM stereo in Encore CS-6, so I don’t know whether the “Do Not Transcode” setting works for audio.
If you do use PCM audio in your DVD, you may need to lower the bitrate of your video encodes, due to the much higher bitrate of PCM stereo.
FYI, PCM is the PC flavor and AIFF is the Mac flavor of uncompressed audio. Both will be higher quality than a Dolby .ac3 audio, which is a lossy compression format.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
The copy protection hardware built-in to Blu-ray players will prevent copying to the capture card even if you are trying to copy from a burnable BD-R disc, which does not use Blu-ray copy protection.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Actually, .mlp is meridian losless packing — a lossless compression format. I am unsure whether Encore will recognize this format even if the codec is installed on your system. You may need to ask the audio person for a PCM or AIFF audio file.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Encore does not work with the advanced Dobly formats permitted in the Blu-ray spec, only the same .ac3 files as for DVD. However, DTS-HD audio is supported in Encore CS-6.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
What software or hadware did you use to encode the video to MPEG-2 for the DVD? Or are you merely dropping the Quicktime from your edit system into DVDSP. That will give you a mediocre quality encode.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
If you want to try authoring using a tool such as Scenarist, you are best advised to spend some time learning from someone who uses this software. It is a steep learning curve to go from the simple tools such as Encore and DVDSP to Scenarist. In spec-level authoring, one needs to learn the rules governing the underlying logic used to build DVDs: domains, video managers, title sets, titles, PTTs, cells, pre/post-commands, etc. These are the logical tools in your toolbox. Encore and DVDSP hide much of this complexity from you, allowing the author to concentrate more on wiring together the program content and menus. If you want to see what spec-level authoring involves, check out this web site:
https://www.dvd-replica.com/scenarist308/productinfo.php
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City