Bill Stephan
Forum Replies Created
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The ports on your computer are RS-232, and the ports on all professional video equipment are RS-422. You need to obtain a converter such as a Rosetta Stone (there are other brands) to connect the two. You can buy cables that have the Rosetta Stone built into the plug on one end, although these usually come from OEMs that include them with their devices.
Mojo doesn’t help with VTR remote unless you are using firewire VTR control. You are far better off using RS-422 remote if your devices have it.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Companies like Broadcast Store (there are 5 or 6 others that do this) broker the sale of used equipment. But I doubt that they would handle a system that is not fully functioning due to the lack of the CPU. Most buyers of used Avid systems don’t have access to the engineering expertise required to replace the CPU and get everything working again.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
You’re out of luck trying to do this on a 1200A. It plays back but does not record 24P. You need the high-end Panasonic VTR to do this (1700?).
Also, this process needs a standards conversion because HDCAM records & plays PsF format and all Panasonic VTRs record P format.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
I doubt if the dub is your problem. It should be a faithful copy of the Digibeta. I would go back to the people who did the film xfer work and explain your concerns. Maybe there is some wierd error that crept into the process. If the job was done correctly, you will learn something from them. If they screwed up, hopefully they will learn something.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Usually there is one punch per reel of film, and there is new time code for each film reel. The punch is the reference point for establishing the A-frame. So there should never be case where A-frames are on timecodes ending in anything other than 00, 05, 10, 15, 20, or 25. Otherwise the film-to-tape session was done wrong, or the tape was re-striped, or something else happened.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
You need to make multiple versions of the menu art, one for each button. Each version has a different button in color with the others monochrome. You then program the buttons to auto activate so that as you navigate to a monochrome button, it jumps to the menu version with the color button. The color button then jumps whereever it needs to when activated.
This type of menu navigation does not work on software DVD players because those have the auto activate function disabled.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Tom,
Use a scan converter on your computer’s monitor out (or use a computer that has a video card with a composite video out like the ATI cards). Then digitize into your edit system or record to tape. Using this method, you can get anything into video that you can see on a computer monitor.
Remember that other media will not necessarily look good in NTSC video, and you may need to “artistically enhance” certain elements to make them look good.
This is how we prepped a mountain of documents for the CBS 60 Minutes story on the Scott Peterson trial.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
If you create letterboxed video, a 16×9 display will have black bars on top, bottom, left and right sides. The only way to deal with that is to enable the zoom mode on the display to fill up the screen. That causes a 33% loss of resolution, plus any encoding artifacts will become much more obvious.
Most owners of 16×9 displays avoid letterbox DVDs like the plague!
The DVD spec provides all that is needed to play 16×9 anamorphic video correctly on all displays.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Oliver,
As I understand it, DVDSP currently does only a subset of the HD-DVD Spec, and Apple has stated that these discs play correctly only on a G5 with Apple DVD Player. DVDSP 5 is supposed to be the first spec-compliant version for HD-DVD.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Not all DVD burning software will use the layer break set by the authoring program. That is why it is safer to have the authoring program burn the DVD.
We don’t use this workflow for replicated DVD-9, so I really can’t guide you any further. Maybe someone with more DVDSP/Toast experience can add to my comments.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City