Bill Stephan
Forum Replies Created
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What did you use to encode the video & audio, and what settings did you use in the encoder? Or are you letting Toast or DVDSP handle the encoding, which almost guarantees a mediocre result.
Another possibility might be that you would get a cleaner looking result if you downconverted the program content first and then added the graphics in standard def. Most broadcast programs are done using this workflow, as graphics usually don’t downconvert well.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
You might want to try out Sorenson’s and Telestream’s demo software to see whether they handle mosquito noise any better than Compressor does. We don’t use either of these for DVD encoding, so I don’t know whether either of these applications would be helpful.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Does the noise look like a pattern of dots around the text? If so, that is mosquito noise, an artifiact produced during MPEG-2 encoding. Better encoders & higher bitrates produce less of this artifact or eliminate it completely. Better DVD players and many of the more expensive home theater surround receivers have filters to supress mosquito noise.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Also check that the DVD player is set correctly in its setup menu for the type of display you are using, whether 16:9 or 4:3.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Sonic/Roxio DVDitProHD has a relatively simple and understandable interface, and it makes compatible DVD and Blu-ray discs.
I would not recommend encoding by merely dropping an AVI into and of the authoring programs. You will get at best a mediocre encode. If you have Adobe Creative Suite, then you should have Adobe Media Encoder. Use this or another encoding application to get better-looking encodes.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
In Scenarist, you can name the title sets, titles and (possibly) the chapters, but I am unsure whether any of these names actually would be displayed by Windows Media Player. It’s not something we normally do during authoring.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Languages are defined by the DVD Spec. You will find that there are far more languages spoken on this planet than exist in the DVD Spec. I’m unsure whether DVDSP makes all of the languages in the spec available to you. If you need a language that DVDSP does not have but exists in the spec, then you should be able to use DVD After Edit to fix the problem. If you need languages not in the Spec, all you can do is pick another. I once authored a series of DVDs with TV soap operas in the Urdu language, and Urdu is not one of the available language choices.
Languages in DVD work mostly for “under the hood” programming, so you can make a menu where the user can choose Simple or Traditional Chinese buttons, but you can tag them as French and Italian, for example. The experience to the viewer depends how you expose the language choices in the DVD to the viewer.
Others who have more experience with multi-language DVDs might have some elegant solutions for you.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
You can copy the Video_TS folder to your hard drive and then use Toast to burn a new DVD-R. You need to select the correct option for burning a DVD Video so that Toast will write the files inside the Video_TS folder in the correct order on the copy. Do not do a straight data copy — that will not produce a usable DVD.
If the copy does not play well but the original disc does, then you have another issue such as bad DVD-R stock, a dirty burner or a weak laser in the burner.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
I would create an 864×480 square pixel QT file in a resolution independent app such as After Effects. Place & resize your image file to suit. Then you can make a 16:9 encode from the new file that will appear on the DVD as you had it in AE. (This assumes you are making an NTSC DVD. You can do the same for Blu-ray, which is easier because all HD formats are square pixels.)
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
On Avid editing systems, you see only one field when you pause playback of footage. On Final Cut Pro systems you see both fields when you pause footage. Both systems are working correctly. As an editor, you need to be aware of what your edit system is showing you.
The interlacing artifacts you see are the nature of all interlaced video standards. If you play your footage out to a picture monitor capable of dealing with interlaced signals, then there is no problem. You should be able to do a quality DVD encode from interlaced footage. We work from every video standard and frame rate, and we don’t get artifacts in our encodes.
All the fun begins when you need to take interlaced footage and do something such as rotoscoping or other effects work. Or when you prepare interlaced footage for use in a progressive medium such as a web site, then you need to deal with the interlacing issues.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City