Bill Stephan
Forum Replies Created
-
CPC makes a version of Caption Maker Pro that works with non-linear edit systems. You export an uncompressed Quicktime, author the captions, then the software encodes the caption data into the Quicktime file. You import back into your NLE yielding video with caption data on line 21.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Lloyd,
The only way to convert 4:3 content into 16:9 content is to chop part of the frame, usually the top and bottom of the image. Whether this works depends on how the shots are composed during the shoot.
You make a frame of video anamorphic by squeezing the image along the x-axis to 75% of its original size. If you are starting with 4:3 content, that process gives you a “pillarbox” or an image with black bars on the left and right side. You have made an anamorphic image, but you have not changed 4:3 content into 16:9 content. You can blow-up the pillarboxed image until the black bars disappear. Now you have a 16:9 FHA (full height anamorphic) image, but the top and bottom of the original image have been cropped off. You can “pan/scan” each shot by moving it up or down in the frame if necessary to include important parts of each shot.
The downside of this process is you lose picture resolution because you are losing part of the original picture area by converting from 4:3 to 16:9. When you start with a true 16:9 image and make it anamorphic such as in an HDTV to NTSC downconversion, you make a full-frame to full-frame conversion that keeps the entire image.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
There is a substantial amount of content being broadcast in England in PAL 16:9 FHA format both on over-the-air networks and on cable. We see delivery specs such as what Lloyd has every day of the week.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
The previous project built in this copy of DVDSP was an HD-DVD. Now that you are trying to create a DVD, DVDSP can’t do the build until the HDDVD_TS folder left over from the previous project is deleted from the Build folder. Jusr delete everything in that folder, and you will be good to go.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Software that can author caption-encoded DVDs that I am familiar with:
Sonic Scenarist 3.1
Sonic DVD Creator 2.17
Sonic DVDit ProHD 6.3
Apple DVD Studio Pro 4
Adobe Encore CS3Note that all of these require the captions to be authored in a closed captioning program such as Caption Maker Pro, which exports an .scc file to be fed to the DVD authoring software.
Many companies, including ours, will author the captions and prepare the .scc file for you.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
You can’t fight the DVD Spec!
When you press MENU on the DVD remote, it goes to the Title Set menu if you were playing program material. Press MENU again and it resumes playing the program where it left off. That is what is supposed to happen according to spec. If you are sitting on a menu and press the MENU key having not yet played any program material, technically there is no place to resume to (essentially an undefined operation), so most DVD players will play the program in the first title set while a few others will crash or stop. You want MENU to take you to a higher-level menu, but that is not the way the DVD spec works, nor does DVDSP work this way.
Normally, the highest-level menu lives in the Video Manager (accessed by the TITLE or TOP MENU keys) and the next lower menu is the Title Set Menu (accessed by the MENU key). The problem with all of this is you cannot build menus this way in DVDSP. It creates its own non-standard menu structure. So you need to be careful that you provide all the links in the menus for where your viewers need to navigate to.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Just make sure that regions 1 to 6 and 8 are turned on in your authoring software. There is no such thing as “region 0”.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
A few things to try:
1. The dongle plugs into the keyboard/mouse port on the back of the Mac, and the Mac keyboard plugs into the dongle.
2. You shouldn’t be having a Y2K problem. Our Media Composer 7.1 doesn’t. But you can always set the time back to the 20th century if you think that might be causing a problem.
3. Check that the SCSI on the back of the Avid MediaDock is set up correctly. There are two sets of ports (A & B). The SCSI cable should be on port A, and there should be a terminator on port A out. Systems I’ve seen don’t have anything connected to port B. If SCSI isn’t set up correctly, that would explain why you don’t see drives on your desktop. If your RAIDed drives don’t show on the desktop, you cannot possibly get any existing media online.
4. There should be an even number of drives (2-12 depending on what hard drives you have).
5. Do your hard drives show up in Apple System Profiler?
I hope something here gets you going.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
I’m not sure that compressor will do a standards conversion, but you can try it and see how far you get. Some people use after effects or various software plug-ins.
Easiest way to check a PAL DVD is to get one of those $39 Cyberhome DVD players that Best Buy sells. It will play a PAL DVD into an NTSC TV (it actually does a standards conversion in the player).
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
You need to convert your video to PAL and then encode it as PAL MPEG-2. You cannot change the disc type to PAL and then use NTSC assets. The frame rate and frame size won’t work.
FWIW approximately 75% of DVD players and television sets in the PAL world can play an NTSC DVD. A small percentage of that number will display the picture as black & white.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City