Bill Stephan
Forum Replies Created
-
All the digital outs on the advanced disc formats are copy protected by AACS, and soon all the analog outs will be also. Eventually, all analog ins/outs will be eliminated at the behest of those in Hollyweird. For this reason, Blu-ray players do not have Firewire outputs.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Not quite real time! DVD recorders need a substantial amount of time to close a disc. The Phillips units in our facility need 30 mniutes to close a disc and the Panasonics need 45 minutes.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
You might need to go into the DVD player’s settings to set the player to restart the DVD from the beginning. Pressing stop twice is supposed to clear all GPRMs and resume point data, but some players are notoriously stubborn about continuing from the last playback point — especially those $29 Cyberlink players.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
1. DVD-R and DVD drives can’t go fast enough to play the bitrates used in BD encoding very well. Getting nice looking HD requires encoding picture at 14-24Mb/Sec, and the BD-spec supports up to 40Mb/Sec.
2. When you burn a BD project to DVD-R, you are creating a non-standard project that might or might not play on a variety of software players (forget settop players). Your mileage may vary.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
If your total bitrate (audio+video+subpicture streams) on DVD-R gets up into the 7.5-10Mb range, some players will have trouble with the disc depending on a lot of factors.
Always stick to high quality DVD-R stock. The crappy stuff gives you bad burns or compatibility issues.
If just one person is having trouble playing DVD-R discs, either the player has compatibility issues or a weak laser diode. Laser diodes can go bad in as little as 6 months. If a DVD player can play replicated DVDs fine but has trouble with DVD-R discs, the laser diode most likely is marginal.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
It might be worth a look at one of those 1,000 page books about Windows (pick the book specific to your version of Windows — 2000 or XP) to see if there is some trick to saving custom colors in the Windows color pallette.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
I don’t belive there is any provision inside Windows to save the custom colors in the pallette. Why not just stick to the 8 colors that Avid gives you, or do you need more colors?
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Have you tried using an HDV to HD-SDI converter to feed the Avid?
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Check out http://www.cpcweb.com/ They make closed captioning software and have a lot of good info on the entire process.
To do captioning for DVD authoring, you create a closed caption project in Caption Maker Pro, and then export an .scc file. That is imported into your DVD authoring software. Not all DVD authoring software has the capability to import caption data. Sometimes the decision is made instead to create DVD subtitles, which also can be exprted from Caption Maker.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
This is a DVD Spec issue that crops up regardless of the authoring software you use. If you have multiple titles within a title set, that will break (cause to not display) the time counter information on the DVD players display. Some authoring software will give you an error such as “Title Not One Sequential PGC” when you create such a structure, although the footage will play correctly as a spec-legal structure.
The solution is to have one title per title set. Some authoring software will rearrange the logic under the hood for you so that this problem does not appear.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City