[Daniel Ludwig]

the important thing is – you can´t playback BDs using an external drive, because of copyprotection within BD-spec.

if it is an internal BD-drive it should work.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

Hi Richie,
there could be only one reason why you haveing trouble like this: you project-setting is wrong.

you´ve never told us before that you are working in PAL, so you need to set your project-settings to PAL and not NTSC.

best thing would be to start over with a new project with PAL-settings, so your assets wont be encoded again and will stay at 25fps.

you´ll see the film wont be transcoded again, and will stay at 25fps.

cheers

danny

PS: PAL and NTSC can´t coexist on DVD!

[Daniel Ludwig]

hi Amar,
first let me say – Encore is not the favour of hollywood studios, they are working with other tools.

but you can also force display of subtitle with encore.

here´s the way to go:

you need to select the button, that starting your film and look at the properties.

look for the link@, and klick on the triangle on the right of it. you´ll get popup, where you can select several things – select specify link on the very bottom.

a new window will be opened, where you need to select the specific subtitle-track and then you need to link to your track. you can also choose the first chapter.

hope this helps.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

Hey Doyle,
1080p24 is a part of BD-specs that felt under the order of NTSC.

BD could contain the following formats (all at the same time):

– 1080p23.98, 1080p24, 1080i50, 1080i60
– 720p50, 720p60
– 720x576i (PAL)
– 720x480i (NTSC)

it´s different what you might know from DVD, where you can have only PAL OR NTSC.

but be awared that int. BD-players wont play 25/50fps as this is only mandatory for countries that broadcast with 25/50fps.

so best way to go is 1080p23.98 or 1080p24 if you would like to create an int. production.

encore is doing it a bit different as the general standard is, but you must live with that.

region code A, B, C is only available if you create a BDCMF for replication.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

Hi Richie,
congratulations to your first project.

yes – creating a DVD is not very easy, we all know that.

but you should learn some basics first:

1.) export your film as selfcontained mov or avi to your harddrive – don´t use the dinamic linking.

2.) you need to create a bitbudget depending on the duration of (all) your films, menus and additional data.

3.) encode your stuff using the right encoders (like adobe media encoder)

4.) import the transcoded assets to the authoring app and do the authoring.

if we are talking about 160min. duration your video-bitrate will be at 3.5MBit/s to nearly fill your DVD with your film.

this calculation is depening on the idea you´ll have AC-3 dolby digital audio @192kibt/s, which is normal for stereo-audio.

if you go 3.5Mbit/s for your video you need to select a VBR with 3.5Mbit/s target-rate and a max. of 7.8Mbit/s.

DVD-spec could be 10Mbit/s data-rate (audio+video) but DVD-/+R could only handle up to 8.5Mbit/s in most cases.

so allways take care about these values, and allways take care about you field-dominance.

if you working with PAL SD you field-dominance is upper first on most formats – but all DV-formats are lower field first.

your video-encoder should have the same field-dominance as your source-video-file.

…. enough information for your first project – go and get it.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

yes – you can!

go out and create a Blu-ray Disc using other stuff then encore.

[Daniel Ludwig]

Brandon,
you left out some important information!

what kind of projects this would be – just simple 1 track-DVDs (without any menus) or are there a few menus, or whatever.

if it´s a very simple one, they could be done using apple compressor 3.5 or higher.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

Janus,
one reason might be, because of wrong field-order.

HDV has upper, DV(Cam) has lower field first.

I would use MPEG Streamclip instead to downscale your video to SD. it´s a free application that could be downloaded.

easy to use and available for PC and MAC.

so export your HDV-film as selfcontained film, then use Streamclip to downscale it to SD using foto-jepeg codec and upper field first, encode your SD-film to MPEG2 (with upper field first) for DVD then author.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

wont agree with you Warren – haven´t seen any difference so far.

the main advantage of H264 vs MPEG2HD is you can create better picture-quality at lower bitrates, so you can put more content on your disc.

and adobe media encoder is using Mainconcept Encoder Engine that is also used with Sonic/Rovi Cinevision Encoder as well.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

hey chris,
there are several ways to go.

this is one:

1.) export your selfcontained movie out of FCP using your sequenz-settings.
2.) transcode your MOV to blu-ray H264 and dolby AC-3. the best thing is to create your own preset.

you can create a generic AC-3-setting up to 640kbit/s, be sure your dialoge-normalisation is -31dbFs and that standard-film-compression is turned off to none on the 3rd. tab.

h264 is the best way to go – compressor only knows 1920×1080 or 720p for HD, there is no difference between 1920 or 1440 by 1080.

HDV is 1440×1080 and it will be decoded/played back at 1920×1080. quicktime is scaling the 1440 correctly to 1920 while playback, you have no influence on that.

but if you have an encoder where you can choose 1920 or 1440 by 1080 you better choose 1440 – otherwise you could get artefacts while encoding.

note: be sure to switch you audio-setting to dolby within your project preferences.

just my 2 cent.

cheers

danny