[Bob Cole]

Hey Dennis, you’re making me feel like the nerdy guy at the party that gets ignored when somebody more interesting shows up. You at least owe me your insights on Kino’s 🙂

— BC, “not a potted plant”

[Bob Cole]

So, given its shortcomings, I assume there is no alternative to eDVD4 for adding DVD-ROM content, seamlessly, to a DVD that will also play on a DVD player. I understand that Macromedia Director can be used for this, with steep learning-curve effort — and for all I know, Director may soon be orphaned anyway in the Adobe buyout.

Or, is there a forum out there which has some eDVD gurus?

— BC

[Bob Cole]

[Dave Friend] “By the way, check out the README.htm file it puts on the DVD disc for the end-user. It uses the wrong file name for manually installing should the auto-install not work. The real kicker is you can’t edit the README file before burning to the disc. If you do the interactual player gives an error saying the image is invalid. It’s a real pain in the a__. Of course my client had trouble – auto install failed – and the bad info in the readme made me look not so good. I’m still trying recover the face lost on that incident. Other than that the eDVD thing works pretty well – when it works at all. Have fun.”

Well that’s very interesting. Have you written a correct installation guide? I was thinking of enclosing a piece of paper (paper!) with guidance for computer use, for both PC and Mac problems. I don’t see why we should have to do this…. unpaid staff of Sonic.

Have you succeeded in contacting Sonic about this, or do you think they even care? I tried to write an e-mail to Sonic through their website, but their support process must have been designed by a maker of blood pressure medicine, as it requires, then rejects a correct serial number, tells you you haven’t registered days after you have, and sends you in a continual loop, until you realize that (even though the eDVD link sends you there) eDVD is NOT listed as one of their “professional” products. I gave up.

— B

[Bob Cole]

[Bob Cole] “If I need eDVD4, is there an Encore-specific tutorial available?”

Sorry — never mind. I should have searched via google before posting — plenty of tutorials out there.

— BC

[Bob Cole]

[Tom] “when I go to the credits page I get a black screen.”

Try clicking on file/check project to detect broken links. Is the credits page a motion menu that hasn’t been rendered?

[Bob Cole]

[Chris Huggett] “Sorry Bob, i seemed to miss the bit where you captured the footage.

Was it off a Digi Beta or off an digital audio tape?”

My situation differs from yours in that I create the surround sound effect from multiple mono audio tracks, inside Premiere Pro. I start with stereo audio and add audio tracks inside Premiere Pro. I’m guessing that your project may actually be easier as you already have the various audio tracks. If you have Premiere Pro with capture capability, but can’t capture all five audio channels at the same time, just digitize multiple passes of your video/audio and sync them up inside Premiere Pro. Then assign the audio tracks their proper locations (frontleft/frontcenter/frontright/rearleft/rearright) with the Premiere Pro mixer, use the Surcode encoder, and you’re done.

I apologize for my answer; it was way too specific, and tied to my particular situation, but I was trying to answer you quickly, so I just copied my notes-to-self about the workflow. (I wrote those notes because I figured it would be a while before another 5.1 project came up and I didn’t want to forget!) My workflow is a bit cumbersome, because (1) I still edit on my great old discreet edit* NLE rather than my crippled Premiere Pro system, which has no capture card (waiting to afford Axio), and (2) I opted for the less expensive Digital Rapids card, which does not have machine control and therefore the easiest way to keep video and audio in sync is to encode them together. (I could use a beep/flashframe and avoid the whole audio encode/conversion step by syncing up the audio and video inside Premiere Pro.)

[Bob Cole]

I had a similar situation so I’ll tell you what I did, and then by reading the other responses, I can learn what I should have done. Basically, I used Premiere Pro with its Surcode .ac3 codec.

Specifically: I used a Digital Rapids card, with the supplied Stream software to make mpeg files of each play. Then I used dBpowerAMP Music Converter to convert the .mp2 audio files to .wav files so that Premiere Pro could handle them. (PPro can’t import the .mp2 files or the .pcm files from Stream.)

Then I imported .mpg (video) and the converted .wav files for each timeline into PPro. In PPro I created sequences with (I think) 5 mono tracks and 5.1 as the primary setting — can’t quite recall.
I made sure not to change the length of any of the tracks. In PPro, I arranged the audio around the 5.1 “space.” (this is the only fun part)

I then used File/Export/Adobe Media Encoder to create surround sound (.ac3) files with Surcode codec. You get three tries at this for free; then you have to buy a license for about $300. I didn’t convert the video files as they were already mpeg.

Then I imported the mpeg and the .ac3 surround sound files into Encore, and created a disk image (which I then burned with a nice program called DVD Encrypter).

— BC

[Bob Cole]

[Steven L. Gotz] “Mostly, I love the way the motorcycles all come to the front at each stop.”

Brilliant. Thanks for sharing.

— BC

[Bob Cole]

agree with Steven — Camtasia is quite nice and there’s a free trial which has no “X” or logo superimposed, unlike at least one other.

[Bob Cole]

Thank you for the keystroke and keyboard and shuttle tips. I have them on order and think that they’ll help me get more comfortable with this new-to-me program.

I guess if I set the large trim offset to “3” I will be able to trim just as fast as with edit*, by using the “3” and the “1” frame trims in succession. And maybe PP 2 will bring in numerical keystroke trims….

I’m struck by the seemingly unnecessary distinction between insert/overlay edits and rolling/ripple edits in PP.

— BC