Heath Firestone
Forum Replies Created
-
Jon,
Good points. I realize that it only effects preview, and isn’t necessary for authoring. I was a little confused by the description of the problem since he says that they play fine on the DVD. After rereading the post, I think he means that the videos play fine, but the motion menu’s show up black. I thought maybe he was just talking about in the preview, which is why I was checking to make sure he was rendering the previews if he was wanting to view them in the preview mode.
My guess is that your question about the possibility that he didn’t set it as the motion video and audio asset of the menu, is probably what is causing the problem.
Heath
-
This may be obvious, but have you selected the “Render current motion menu or slideshow” button in the preview window? It is fairly easy to miss, placed in the lower left corner just above the size selection drop down. It doesn’t even really look like a button, but mouse-over displays it’s function.
If you don’t select this, it only displays the first frame, which may be black.
I can’t tell from your description what is going on, but it occurred to me that your motion menu byuttons might show up black if you hadn’t rendered them in the preview window.
I hope this is helpful.
Heath
-
If you use Encore, you are limited to the features supported by a DVD authoring program, but it isn’t too difficult to learn. Another thing to consider is that in Encore, you can author the DVD, or export to flash, which creates the player interface, and acts the same as the DVD, just at lower data rates, encoded to MPEG4. You are limited on control over data rates, and more advanced controls in the player menu, but it’s not a bad option if you can live with those restrictions.
-
Are you sure you have selected A Blu-Ray preset using 1920 X 1080 in Encore? If you do this, importing full resolution .psd files won’t convert to a lower resolution. I suspect you either have a DVD preset, or have your project resolution set to 720 X 480. You can check this by choosing File, Project Settings.
Hope this helps,
Heath
-
H.264 is MPEG4, which is a more efficient codec from a space standpoint. In other words, at lower data rates, it will produce superior quality video than MPEG2. At higher data rates, there is a rolloff, and the quality differences are difficult to differentiate. Both produce great results at 25Mbps, which is what I like to shoot for. The only downside of going with H.264 is that render times take quite a bit longer, and the processing power needed to decode is higher, but will not be a problem for Blu-Ray players. I can’t think of a good reason to author to MPEG2, unless you are extremely restricted on time for renders, and H.264 will take too long, but for normal situations, the quality benefits outweigh any downsides.
-
The multiple movie ideas is very easy, just create a firstplay menu which allows you to choose which movie menu you want them to be directed to. For each movie, create a menu with a Play button, and a chapters button. Have the Chapters button select a new menu, where you create buttons for every chapter, attached to each of the chapter points in that particular timeline. It’s about as simple as it gets.
As far as the .pdf is concerned, you will need to convert each page of the .pdf to a .jpg, or .psd, taking into account for the aspect ratio change, and title safe zones. Create menus for each page, and create forward and back buttons to allow them to navigate through the pages. Remember, that you are dealing with 720X480 resolution, so small print may be a problem for reading. You might need to chop your pages in two, so that they will fit the page, and have enough resolution and be large enough to be read on a TV.
Hope this answers your questions,
Heath
-
You need to focus on data rates. If you encode at 7Mbps, one hour of video will take up a little over 3GB of space. But remember, the numbers for amount of space depends on how they do the math. If you’ve ever noticed, a 100GB drive usually comes up around 93.28GB when formatted. This is because the manufacturers consider 1 GB to be a billion bytes, whereas the computer divides by 1024, not 1000. Based on conversion from kilobyte to megabyte, to gigabyte, the difference of 1000 verses 1024, makes up for the difference. That being said, a 25GB BD-R only holds 23.32GB of data. If you are using variable encoding, at times, it may take up more than your target data rate. That being said, you should have been able to fit six hours of footage on a 25GB BD-R, even with variable encoding and any additional menu overhead. The automatic settings when you choose Blu-Ray are set at 15Mbps for some odd reason, so under your transcode for the clips you are adding, choose something like the 7Mbps data rate, and it should work for you. DVD’s are limited to 8Mbps data rate, but Blu-Ray does not have the same limitation.
Try these settings and see if it makes any difference.
I hope this helps,
Heath
-
If you’ve already created the disk image, you shouldn’t need to use Encore to do the burn.
Try burning the disk image using whatever disk burning utility you normally use, probably Nero, or Roxio.
Hope this helps.
-
If you’re asking about the viability of doing it, it’s definitely viable. Like you said, though, you want the menus to look appropriate for all mediums. I haven’t used it for webpage, except as samples of work from the DVD’s I’ve created, but it is possible to do. I like the fact that you can give people something downloadable that gives them the interface and navigation of the DVD. Whether you want your whole site to be Flash, with the limitations of what you can do Flash encoding wise in Encore or not, is still a question, but it would allow you to have a flash link to your latest online Demo Reel, which could be virtually identical to your HD and DVD Demo Reel.
Heath
-
Two Pass 7Mbps VBR is a good bet. Some DVD players get goofy if the data rate ever jumps over 8Mbps, so 7Mbps is a little safer. Doing a two pass encode means it can plan out the compression to optimize for encoding. It’s one of the presets, and I use it when space it not a concern.
Heath