Bill Stephan
Forum Replies Created
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Using a GOP size of 6 will give very poor compression, plus we have seen multiple cases where short GOPs cause difficulty in playback on many DVD players. This is because you have more than twice as many I-frames than normal, which are complete images.
Difficult material really needs to be encoded on a high quality hardware-based encoder that supports segment re-encoding to deal with the tough sections.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Anytime you mix two identical audio tracks together, the level output will be 3Db higher than the source tracks. Don’t pan the source tracks to center on the test signals.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Do you see any picture errors (blocks) or hear any audio garbage anywhere in your master DVD? The duplicator might be finidng an uncorrectable data error somewhere in you disc. Or maybe your bitrate has a very high spike that the duplicator doesn’t like. The only other issue I can think of would be if the DVD isn’t closed, but that usually only comes up on standalone DVD recorders.
Play your DVD in a player that can display the bitrate (most can). If it hit 10.0, you might need to reduce your encode rate. Otherwise try burning another DVD and maybe the duplicator will like that one.
Always use high quality DVD-R blanks.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
You might want to recreate the text document in Photoshop as a series of menus in order to make the text more readable and to add some nice looking navigation buttons.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
If you output to an VTR with analog audio, set your tone level in audio tool to -14. If you output to a digital VTR, set your tone level to -20. In both cases the audio in your program should be no higher than 10DB over reference (tone) level to be broadcast legal (unless you have specs that dictate otherwise).
You can create tone in audio tool to cut into your timeline (Create tone media) or use “play calibration tone” and record it directly to tape with bars from video output tool.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
If your Avid system has the color corrector toolset, that is a much better way to change the look of a shot; and it doesn’t interfere with any effects on the layer. You have much more control than in Image Effect.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
You will lose the effect of 24fps when you downconvert to NTSC because the Varicam records 720/59.94P ONLY — no matter what frame rate you set on the Varicam. The only thing that happens when you set frame rates in the Varicam is that it flags in metadata the frames it needs to produce the desired frame rate. To use that metadata, you need to edit on an Avid DS, which will store only the frames needed from the 59.94P stream. Or you can edit on a Final Cut Pro system that is set up for HD and has the Panasonic frame rate converter software installed. Or you can run your Varicam footage through a hardware Panasonic frame rate converter unit, which recovers the true 24P frame rate.
Only after doing one of these steps, then you can downconvert to NTSC and edit away.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
You would output the After Effects work and either encode it in a software encoder, or let your DVD authoring software encode it. Most DVD authoring software has a provision for transcoding quicktime movies to be used as motion menus or short elements.
Everything in your DVD comes together in the authoring. That is where all the elements are combined and the navigation constructed.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
The preferred method of making animated menus or elements for DVD is usually Adobe After Effects plus whatever whiz-bang plug-ins to need to make the look you want.
Be aware that if you are considering doing something like “Scene It”, you are looking at preparing tens or hundreds of thousands of assets, and only the highest-end authoring systems will be able to deal with that.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
All widescreen DVDs are encoded at 720×576 pixels (for PAL). You need to encode from an anamorphic video, and then you must flag it as being 16×9 in the encoder. If that is done, the DVD player will scale the picture content correctly for letterbox or full frame on a 4×3 display; or it will display full frame on a 16×9 screen (provided that the setting for display type is set correctly in the DVD player).
You can create a DVD using a letterboxed master (again encoding at 720×576); however you will alienate the viewers with 16×9 displays, as the video will appear with a large black border around all four sides of the picture.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City