[Daniel Ludwig]

hi arthur,
your main problem is the first-play “menu”.

it is necessary for replicated DVDs to have a track as firstplay (mostly a disclaimer or FBI-warning), to keep the resume-buffer of the DVD-player happy. otherwise the disc will do strange things like you have right now. the best position to have this track within VTS1, but as within you can´t organize your VTS you need to add this track as the real first track in your DVD-project.

just place 3-4sec. black picture with silence AC3 into it, and set it to first-play, afterwards you can jump to your menu.

the AUDIO_TS-folder is necessary for proper playback, so don´t care about it.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

could be a to high bitrate or bad media? what bitrate did you use?

[Daniel Ludwig]

hi,
sorry for delay – but pro res LT is a real bad source for transcoding video-material to MPEG2.

I´ve seen this issue a few times – you need to online your LT-clips with pro res or pro res HQ, so you´ll get better encoding-results.

if you watched your final DVD on a computer it will not show nice pictures from interlaced material as well – you need to look your DVD on a tube-monitor.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

ciao dom,
if the most DVDs you are authoring do not exceed 60min. don´t think about VBR (and all its values). that´s what could be done with CBR at 7.8Mbit/s and 192kbit/s AC-3-audio.

don´t waste your time on thinking about other options – that makes no sence.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

andy,
I would start from scratch, if the project is not too complicated.

1.) transcode your assets using AME
2.) start authoring your BD using these transcoded assets
3.) burn it to high quality BD-R like verbatim
4.) check the BD on different players (especially different manufacturer – we´ve figured out, that sony+philips and panasonic are reacting totally different.

finally if they have older BD-players they could have a problem with BD-R-media in general.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

It´s no good idea to send from FCP directly to compressor – as you are blocking 2 applications with it.

a better way is to export from FCP as selfcontained movie to your harddisc and use this file with compressor.

you can also set compression-marker/chapter-marker, and will be a lot faster.

finally you can go on editing within FCP while compressor is doing it´s job.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

hey guys,
first of all please let me tell you that SD DVD NTSC is 720×480, and by the way it make no difference if it would be 4:3 or 16:9, this is just a flag/bit that will be implemented into the MPEG-stream how the aspec-ratio of each pixel must be displayed.

depending on the CS-version that you´re using you need to set menus in different pixel-aspecs, as adobe decided to do some significant changes from CS4 to CS5.

as I haven´t got the NTSC-parameter in mind at the moment (as I´m in PAL-land) I will describe it with PAL. PAL is original 1024×576 for 16:9 in square pixels, if you are working with anamorph pal-pixels this is 720×576 (which is in fact used), but adobe decided to change it to 1050×576.

NTSC is 720x486px, that will be cropped for SD-MPEG2 to 720x480px, but what ever you do, NTSC-DVD could only handle 720×480.

I would advice to transcode assets prior authoring within any DVD/BD-authoring-application. if you are using 16:9-material you should flag it 16:9, so everything should be fine.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

Hi Tim,
your encoder-settings don´t make sence. if you are using 6.5 max bitrate and 6.2 target-bitrate there is only a very small space for the VBR. do you have multiple audi-tracks on your DVD?

if you are encoding for DVD-R/+R i would advice to use 8.2Mbit/s as max. bitrate and depending on your duration – it might be a lower bitrate for the target-bitrate – you need to create a bitbudget to know exactly.

be sure to use high-quality media like verbatim or tayo juden.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

hi,
if you are using anything else than mainconcept preset you need to re-adjust the VBV-buffer under advanced features.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

hi per,
squeeze is no good choice.

I would suggest to try episode, TMPENC, adobe media encoder (AME), Mainconcept Reference, or something else. if you are on mac you can choose AME, Compressor or Mainconcept Reference.

I would advice NOT to use Matrox Hardware/Software as it would not create valid streams.

cheers

danny