Bill Stephan
Forum Replies Created
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John,
I don’t know what specific book you are looking for, but maybe a search or two on Amazon might uncover it.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
The manual for your controller says to update the firmware if you are getting a large number of burns that don’t verify. Also lower the burn speed. Did you do both of those things?
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Scott,
If you are seeing banding in the picture, chances are you are using 8-bit video somewhere in your workflow. 8-bit is not good enough to reproduce subtle gradations of color/grayscale, such as in an outdoor shot with a lot of sky. You need 10-bit color. More bitrate in the encoder will not solve this problem.
You cannot bypass the maximum bitrate settings in your encoders, and you really should not have to.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Regarding transcoding, Encore will transcode PCM files to .ac3. It will not use the PCM audio directly. Professional authoring software will support the use of PCM and the new advanced encoding formats.
Regarding dialnorm, this is metadata that is used to adjust the output level on the viewers equipment to a known standard. It has nothing to do with the production info. To cite an extreme example of how this works, if you have an audio track that is 10dB too hot and then measure dialnorm, you should get a reading around -17, which is 10dB above standard level. This causes the audio level to be lowered 10dB on the viewers playback system, restoring a standardized playback level.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Apple Compressor is definitely not free. If there is a free demo version out there, I would expect the feature set to be stripped down.
Regarding audio encoding, you set Dialogue Normalization according to the value measured in a Dolby LM-100 or a software meter. If the audio is being mixed in a professional audio facility, you should require that they give you this measurement. If the audio mixer can give you an LKFS (loudness) measurement, this would be close enough and you can use that value for dialnorm. If you don’t have any meaurement, better to use the default value, of -27, which will optimize the audio compression a bit better across the dynamic range of the mix.
Don’t touch the Audio Production Info unless you know what the calibrated specs for the mixing room are.
.ac3 compression is chosen from a list of options: None, Film Normal, Film Light, Music Normal, Music Light or Speech. I tend to use the Light or None options.
Encore does not work with the new Dolby and DTS advanced audio streams created for Blu-ray.
Regarding video encoding, both AME and Apple Compressor will encode a nice H.264 for Blu-ray. Professional compressionists use bit-budgeting spreadsheets to figure bit rates. You can use 30Mbits as a starting bit rate, which is around the sweet spot for quality vs. file size.
The first rule of encoding: Never let the authoring software encode or transcode anything except for a still menu.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Scott,
If you are on Mac, it is easy to encode a 5.1 surround Dolby .ac3 file
using Apple Compressor, which accepts 6 .wav or .aif files as source for a surround encode.Alternatively, you can encode the Lt/Rt mix as a stereo encode in almost any Dolby encoder. Be sure to set the surround flag to “Surround Encoded”. This normally defaults to “Not Indicated” in most encoders. The LT/Rt tracks will not have as much channel separation as the discreet 5.1 tracks, but there will still be a decent surround space.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
The number one concern if you do any color correction work, whether on photographs or on motion video, is to have a good quality, calibrated monitor to judge your work. That is key to having the results of your work display correctly on another device or on the Internet. Its doubly important if you want to print your photos. You simply cannot produce work that reproduces correctly using a flaky computer display.
The day I got Lightroom up and running on my Mac was he day I walked down the block to B&H Photo to buy monitor calibration hardware/software. (I got Color Munki.)
The histogram in Lightroom shows you the distribution of blacks, grays and whites. I think the histogram is very confusing for analyzing color. I wish someone would make a plug-in that displays a YRGB waveform. This would make it very easy to establish a good color balance for any image.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Lightroom would be a good choice for someone migrating from Aperture. It has only the Photoshop tools that are important to photographers (color correction, healing brush, etc.) while omitting functions that photographers would rarely use. A histogram display always shows the state of the current image (available also in Photoshop).
Lightroom offers an easy-to-use library of lens correction profiles to remove the geometric distortion introduced by your lenses. Perspective correction function works either very well (usually) or not at all depending on the image. This function can save a lot of editing time.
If you need functions that are unavailable in Lightroom, there is a simple workflow to jump into Photoshop and then bring the image back into the Lightroom library.
Lightroom will handle almost all of your image editing needs, but it might also feel a bit overwhelming at first. You may want to obtain a book such as Scott Kelby’s Lightroom book, which breaks down the functions in easy-to digest sections.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Did you try the “top menu” button? That activates the menus on the Panasonic Blu-ray players I have here in the office.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
I do not have any information on hacking Encore projects. Sorry.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City