Bill Stephan
Forum Replies Created
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What is the source of the audio you used? If it came from a mini-DV camera (not DVCAM or DVCPro), the unlocked audio used in these devices can and does cause sync to drift as you proceed through various digital production processes. BEWARE OF UNLOCKED AUDIO!
Our company has a proprietary method to deal with this problem, which crops up all the time these days. As more people try to do high-end production using inexpensive tools, the limitations of these devices become apparent.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Not sure about files not importing randomly, but check that you are digitizing all audio on the Symphony as OMF. If you digitize as wave files, you will not be able to export these to Protools via OMF.
We put this in the Site Settings so that you have to deliberately screw with the digitize settings to cause this problem.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Don’t bother with Firewire drives unless you have one of the PCs such as the Compaq, HP, or IBM workstations that are segmented internally into multiple data channels. You cannot use multiple Firewire devices simultaneously in the same section of the PC. You can use one Firewire device on each of 2 Firewire interface cards connected to different segments of the PC.
If you are using a Firewire VTR, it must operate simultaneously with the hard drives to be able to digitize or dump out to tape.
Read the configuration guides for the HP 8000 series or the IBM Intellestation Z Pro on Avid’s web site for a more complete explanation of how this works.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Do you see, when you play the DVD, something like the following?
T 00:00
or
T 13
or
T 13:00If so, that is an error message from the DVD player telling you that your disc is unplayable.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Avid needs to overlay “external” video (the source & record monitors) over the desktop/program graphics, so the video display card and the driver must posess this specific capability and be completely compatible with Avid. Otherwise you will have all kinds of weird problems.
This is why it is wise to stick to Avid-tested hardware.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Sonic Scenarist and Producer should be adding DVD+R9 support after NAB. DVD Studio Pro can do everything you need right now.
As far as alpha channel support goes, DVD authoring programs use still/motion menu art + overlay art or, alternatively, layered Photoshop files. For motion menus, you might want to build them in After Effects or directly in DVDSP.
Building “play all” discs and tracking menu navigation requires you to be able to create the scripting or programming needed and to use GPRMs.
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Is your camera set to record 32 or 44KHz audio? That’s a no-no! You need 48KHz for DVD.
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Incorrect navigation in the DVD player usually indicates tha the authoring might be buggy. On a replicated DVD, bad manufacturing usually shows up as MPEG errors in the picture plus garbage in the sound track. This happens because the data becomes corrupted in the portion of the disc that is n.g.
Certain brands & models of settop DVD players are known to execute particular programming instructions incorrectly. Also, many PC and Mac software DVD players have problems in this regard.
This illustrates the need for compatibility testing before replication. Did you or anyone else test the check discs before the replication run was authorized?
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Don’t forget that the bitrate that the DVD player must process is the sum of the bitrate for the video stream + the total bitrate for all the audio streams + the total bitrate for all the subpicture streams. All of these are interleaved together when the VOBs are multiplexed, and all of these must be played back, even though you can be displaying only one picture stream, one audio stream, and one subpicture stream.
So 7.0 for picture + 1.6 for a PCM audio track = 8.6mb/s.
When you start pushing a sustained 8.0 or above on a DVD-R, that becomes a stress test for the disc and the player.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City