[Daniel Prantl]

Hello,

if this reply is not to late: in the media-settings-tab, right next to the preview window, there is a “sub-tab” that should be called something like final action (“endaktion” in my german DVDAP). There you can set what happens when playback is finished. Setting the first item here (“Befehl” in german, mayber order) to “Link” an the second item (“Ziel”, maybe goal) to the name of the video whose properties you are just editing results in looped playback for me.

I hope this helped?

Regards,

Daniel Prantl

[Daniel Prantl]

Hello,

I don’t know wether this issue has already been resolved, but since I am working a lot with the multi-angle feature of DVD Architect pro in an education project, I thought I could be helpful here:

DVD Architect pro’s multi-angle-workflow is alittle bit different than with other dvd authoring software like DVDSP or similar. In some ways, much easier, but with this also prone to more problems on the image-quality side. Footage you import into a multi-angle DVDAP-Project is _always_ re-rendered, thus making sure that all the settings pointed out above (closed and equal-length-gops, footage of the exactly same length) are right. (Maybe this is because DVDAP also supports the mixed-angle and not only the multi-angle DVD specification which allows you to make only parts of a DVD title in multi-angle, thus saving space on a DVD).
In compliance with the manual and sony support, this re-rendering of footage cannot be disabled. The negative side-effects of this re-rendering is, as you have noted, first, a much longer DVD preparation time and second a sincere loss in quality, especially if the footage is already compressed when it is imported in DVDAP. Because of this, sony recommends rendering the corresponding footage as AVI with the PAL/NTSC-DV profile from Vegas. As I found out that this still leads to quite high quality loss, I came to the following solution: Rendering the footage to PAL-/NTSC-DV in PROGRESSIVE and NOT INTERLACED resulted in a much better quality of the resulting DVDs. (Even better quality can be achieved by rendering to uncompresed AVI in progressive (29p or 25p), but the resulting files are very big (~120 GB/hour)).

So I would like to recommend you rendering your angles as DV-AVI in 29p or 25p and then importing them to DVDAP. Besides, for improving quality, you can also set the bitrate in which the DVD angles should be recorded in the “optimize disk”-dialogue – they can be set much higher than pointed out in an above posting. (I am working with 4-5 Mbps producing very compatible DVDs). I found out that using dual layer-DVDs for multi-angle also helps here.

The bad thing, of course, is that DVDAP always re-renders the files. But as far as I researched, it is still the only windows DVD authoring software (that is somehow affordable) that can produce multi-angle DVDs that work without any problems. Or am I wrong?

Regards,

Daniel

[Daniel Prantl]

hello,

maybe this answer is a little late but hopefully it can resolve this problem I’ve been working with a long time now.
I’ve had the same error message (error writing file. the reason could not be determined) in many different settings, but all with very big file sizes involved. Researching in many different forums brought up that the “error writing file”-message only seems to show up under these circumstances (multi-angle projects, blueray, etc.., is to say “big” projects with reencoding). Now I realized that the error comes up in the process of disc preparation at the specific moment a VTS_01_10.vob should be created (as the other .vobs are bigger than 1 GB). A Number greater than 9 seems to be unallowed in the DVD specifications (file name length limit). Of course, this normally is not necessary as the maximun dvd size is about 8,5 GB. But even when DVD Architect states that the file size could be OK, this is just an estimation because the multiangle content is reencoded by DVDA (unfortunately this has to be).

The problem could thus be resolved (up to this moment, I hope this was the big fault), by setting the recompresion bitrate a bit lower, so that the estimation of DVD architect is about 1 GB below the DVD-size limit (about 7,5 GB).

I would be very interested if any other users observed the same behaviour in likewise situations and if reducing the resulting file size solves this issue.

Thanks in advance,

Daniel