[John Dobovan]

Hmm, yes. That’s my experience as well. Problem is, they want to use the Play button. I can’t seem to find any way to make that happen. Enter causes the track info to display briefly, partially obscuring the start of the video track. Guess I can put a slight delay in the play start. Sure would like to enable to Play button though….

[John Dobovan]

Brilliant. Thanks!

J.

[John Dobovan]

Sorry, should have been more specific. I’m working in DVDSP3 on a presentation video. There is no menu, just 2 video tracks and 1 subtitle track. First play is set to Track 1, which is just video and audio track 1 and it returns to itself for continuous loop. Track 2 is supposed to be activated by the Play button but I see no way to do that without a script. I have both Title and Menu set to trigger Track 2 (which jumps back to Track 1 after playing).

What I need is a simple script that tells DVDSP to play Track 2 if the Play button is pressed. That’s all. Anybody got an elegant solution?

TIA,
John

[John Dobovan]

Jeff:

This project file is unlike any I have ever experienced before. I shot in HD (albeit 960×720 on a Panny 170) and edited to 1280×720. It was basically a single take of about an hour duration. The FCP edited video looks great on my HD monitor and when I export the file, in either SD or HD, it looks great then too (Iʻve tried exporting both by reference and as a stand alone file). But when I compress it using the same settings I have always used in Compressor, I get a pattern of glitches that come and go on a regular basis. Not constantly but persistently enough to make the end product unusable. I have compressed numerous other files before and since with nothing like this, ever. Been in this biz since ʻ75 and nonlinear since ʻ90 so I donʻt think Iʻm making any newbie mistake here. But Iʻm at the point where I am either going to have to refund the client or re-shoot. But before I do that Iʻd like to try sending the file out for compression by somebody who knows a whole lot more about compression than I do. Is this something you could/would handle? Or can you recommend somebody?

Thanks,
John

[John Dobovan]

Jeff:

No, the original material looks fine. It’s just the encoded versions that look bad. Tried exporting directly to compressor but that failed to even work. I’m starting to think this may be drive-related. I have the entire project on a 1TB FW drive, connected via FW400. The project was shot and cut at the low end of 720p30 (960). Even so, it tends to stutter or freeze on playback. So I’m thinking I need to port the whole thing over to a faster drive and try again. Unless you have a better idea.

thanks for your help,
John

[John Dobovan]

Weird. That’s actually worse now. Just to be sure I’m doing this right: I exported a standalone 720p30 file from FCP, then encoded that in Compressor as an uncompressed 10-bit 16×9 SD video clip. And then used Compressor again to encode for DVD at the hightest rate. When that failed, I bumped the data rates to 6.8/8.0. Still, some very bad artifacts now.

Interestingly, the original HD clip was only 26 GB but the SD encode came in at 100GB. Obviously, the HD wasn’t a completely standalone file.

I’m going to try exporting from FCP again, this time as an uncompressed SD file direct to a faster drive and see what happens.

[John Dobovan]

Hmm. Stil the same problem. But I see that I’ve introduced a new problem in the aspect ratio during the down convert. And the resulting file won’t play back properly off this FW drive I have it on. I’ll have to try this again from a faster drive.

[John Dobovan]

OK, that sounds like a good idea, I’ll run it now and report back here. Many thanks Jeff!

[John Dobovan]

Jeff:

I’ll try anything. But just to be sure I understand, are you saying use Compressor to convert the original file to uncompressed? I think I can also output it from FCP at something close to uncompressed.

Any and all suggestions gratefully accepted…

J.

[John Dobovan]

Oops. Should have been more specific – I’m on a Mac platform. SubRip looks useful for Windows users but won’t help me.

As for the menu, I’ve tried using MPEG Streamclip to pull out the custom backgrounds but it only gives me the last one. I can see the first and have tried several methods but they all come with the last one only. Very strange.

Thanks,
J.