Bill Stephan
Forum Replies Created
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Stock photo houses such as Getty Images have images of money from the U.S. and other countries that you could use for your project.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Jane,
If you can find an HD-DVD player, it will play the HD-DVD you made in full 1080i HD. We have a number of clients who exhibit at trade shows who bought HD-DVD players before they were discontinued.
Sorry, but you can’t borrow my HD-DVD player.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Jon,
Just as you are doing, I am creating a digital archive of all the family photos, including prints back to my mother’s 1st grade class photo, about 50,000 Kodachrome slides, negatives and digital files. I’ve encountered just about every possible issue one can have with old photos.
There is no magic button (software application or utility) that will magically fix all of this. There are many things that are good at fixing one problem or a range of issues (such as sharpening plug-ins). You must remember that computers are devices that execute the instructions taught to them via their programming. Nothing replaces the human eye for making creative choices, although Photoshop contains an amazing amount of artificial intelligence.
My workflow is to get the grayscale set correctly for each photo in the scanning software, then bring the files into Adobe Lightroom for final repair. Lightroom works on .tif, .bmp, and .jpeg files as well as camera raw files. The fixes you make in Lightroom are non-destructive — they are applied when you output an image.
Lightroom can save presets of multiple processes applied to an image, so you may be able to create presets that fix a good deal of your image problems. Also, Lightroom has tools not available within Photoshop — I’ve saved a few severely blurred photos that were candidates for the recycle bin. You also get a good image library system for storing and finding your images.
Lightroom is not outrageously expensive, and you get a lot of capability for the money. It is seriously complex software, as formidible as Photoshop, so you would be wise to invest in one of the books that teach Lightroom. I believe Adobe has a trial version of the software.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
PAL is always upper field first.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
One thing we found is that the more rounded the profile on the edge of the inner hole, the more trouble automated systems will have picking up and handling the discs.
The best DVD-R stock we ever used in automated machinery was made by Pioneer. The inside hole was cut with a perfectly square profile, and it was rare to see an automated duplicator or printer have difficulty picking these discs.
As someone else mentioned, the alignment of the machinery can make a major difference in improving operation.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Did you burn from within DVDSP using the burn button or the build/format button, or did you burn your disc in Toast or another burning app?
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
What files and/or folders do you see on the DVD? At the root level of the disc, there should be a folder named VIDEO_TS. Inside that folder, you will find files with extensions .vob, .ifo, and .bup. Also there may or may not be a folder named AUDIO_TS, which should be empty. If you see anything else, or if there are only files at the root level of the DVD disc, then the DVD is not built and formatted correctly, and you will not have a playable DVD.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Geoff,
Let’s start with the Blu-ray because that is the easy answer: 1080/23.976P with regions A,B,C enabled. That disc will play anywhere.
For the DVD, there is no true universal solution. An NTSC DVD with all regions enabled will play on 95% of PAL players/monitors, but very little equipment in the NTSC part of the world can display PAL. So that means you need to convert your PAL source before making an NTSC DVD.
If you are shooting the same program in both HD and PAL, why not make an NTSC DVD from the 1080/23.976P HD source?
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Randy,
The function of the stop button is fixed by DVD Spec. You can’t redefine the function. The stop button terminates all further execution of the DVD, making any navigation on the disc impossible.
The only buttons that can be redefined are the “Menu” and “Top Menu” buttons (and in very limited circumstances the “resume” button). You need a spec authoring application to do it because you need to insert a pre-command into the Video Manager or a Title Set Menu. You can’t directly access these in apps like DVDSP or Encore.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
4.8 is the mean bitrate, not the minimum. If you use 4.8 as the minimum, your program will not fit on the DVD (as you discovered).
The mean bitrate is the “middle of the road” figure. The encoder will allow the bitrate to go higher and lower than that amount based on the complexity of the video at any given point. In better encoders, you can specify the amount of deviation from the mean in order to optimize the usage of the encoding bitrate.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City