[Paul Benson]

Make sure everything looks okay in the flowchart.
https://help.adobe.com/en_US/EncoreDVD/4.0/WSbaf9cd7d26a2eabfe807401038582db29-7f80a.html

Also, check for an auto-activate button on your menu. While the PC and DVD may be the same, maybe your PC starts out with no button activated.

Another possibility is your loop count or menu time out. These get ignored if the buttons change off of the default. So, your PC may be moving it off of the default (maybe your arrow pointer is over the button?) and this keeps the menu displayed.

Finally, try another DVD player and see if the problem repeats.

Pauley

[Paul Benson]

Sounds like you need to reset. Hold down ctrl-alt-shift (or cmd-option-shift) as soon as you start launching PS. You should get a dialog box asking if you want to delete your settings. Answer yes. The side effect is that PS will now revert to its original settings and layouts.

Pauley

[Paul Benson]

Well, I guess ideally you would set it up as a multi-angle DVD with different audio tracks.

Encore does not support multi-angle (unless CS5 does), so I believe you are stuck with a menu where the user can choose the video to watch. From there, you can have the user choose the music, with each music on a different audio track. Not as efficient, but it should work.

How to create a menu, select audio tracks, and loop are all explained in the Encore help menu.

Pauley

[Paul Benson]

Just a follow up in case others want to do this.

Yes, my concerns were validated. The Adobe encoder had some serious compression artifacts due to the size of this video (95 minutes on a single layer DVD). It is smart enough to use just about all of DVD in its attempt to maximize quality, so my video was a bit over 4GB with about 500MB of AC3 audio.

The HCEncoder produced improved output in less space. My first attempt was a 2.6GB video file. Since I still saw some artifacts (ripples on a lake and some text scrolling across a busy/moving background were the most problematic) I used an online bitrate calculator to change some of my compression parameters and traded file size for quality. My end result was a 3.6GB video file, so even with the audio, I was still under the 4.7GB limit.

This is what I did, and thank you Jon for pointing me in the right direction.

From Premiere I encoded in the video to an mpeg2 100 bit i-stream. Since my source was not HD I started with the “NTSC DV High Quality” MPEG2 preset. I maxed the quality to 5 and changed the Bitrate Encoding to CBR, but my max bit rate was capped at 15. I also had to change the Profile to High and the Level to High – this then allowed me to change the max bitrate to 100. No audio encoding for this pass and added to render queue.

Saved the audio of the movie as a WAV file. Added to render queue and then rendered out the audio and video.

Next was the DGIndex app. Launched DGIndex. Opened my new mpeg file. Saved my file and let the app do its job. I did not tweak anything. This created a .d2v file.

Next was the HCEncode app. I used the GUI interface. I clicked on the buttons on the lower right and it automatically found the AVIsynth program I had installed and the DGDecode (part of DGIndex) program as well. I then set the input, output, and log files from the buttons on the top left. I changed some of the options, such as changing the aspect ratio to 4:3, profile to best, and, later, I changed the avg and max bitrates. In one of the tabs there was a place for interlacing options, I left it at auto-detect, but I also hit the BFF (for lower/bottom field first, since I was using DV footage and making a DVD). Not sure if that was needed, but my file came out okay. On the matrix tab I changed the matrix to FOX1 as suggested by Jon. I hit Encode and off it went.

Finally, Encore was launched and I just added the final mpeg file and the audio (wav) file to the timeline. Created my menu and built the DVD. Encore did not try to re-encode the video file, as expected.

One mistake I made was that I made an mpg through HCEncode and then went back to Premiere and added some more video, so my 100Mb i-stream mpg got larger. Well, HCEncode has a memory of what was done last time, and I didn’t click the button ‘all frames’ to update that count. I thought it would automatically update that field to my new video source’s length. It didn’t and my next attempt was cropped. Running HCEncode again and clicking that button generated the proper file.

Not sure if I need/want to go through this process every time, but it really did allow me to cram more video at a higher quality than Encore.

Pauley

[Paul Benson]

As Jeff states, the blurriness is a natural byproduct of magnifying an image beyond its natural resolution. Adobe does a pretty good job of removing jaggies, but the blurring is the consequence. You could try either the Sharpen or Unsharp Mask video effects to add some pseudo-edges.

Pauley

[Paul Benson]

I have also read that there were ways to put Quadro firmware on the GeForce cards. This was for older cards, and maybe nVidia has added some tricks to prevent that, but hackers usually win that battle. As previously stated, Quadro provides accurate renders vs the GeForce speed renders using almost the same hardware. Maybe wait 6 months and see what hack tools show up?

Pauley

[Paul Benson]

Hmm, I’m surprised that the menu hung on your first example. I would have thought that would work. It also sounds like you know the ‘correct’ answer of creating a separate menu.

Maybe this would work, but it has some flaws (and I’m not sure it is possible). Have the end action of the menu go back to the beginning of the menu but also change the audio track. I am not sure if the audio track needs to exist (and be silence) or if you can just point it to a non-existent audio track. Then, when the user selects a button, you would have to remember to change the audio track back to your main one. One problem is if the person exits the DVD and your player is still pointing to the non-primary audio track.

Pauley

[Paul Benson]

Thanks again for the response and for pre-answering some questions I had not reached (e.g. I didn’t realize I needed DGIndex).

This is old family video on 720×480 DV, so I haven’t crossed the HD bridge, yet. I’ll check out those links, though. I must admit that I am surprised I export to mpeg2 out of Premiere. I guess that is a pretty high quality mpeg2, then HCEncoder shrinks it with very little loss. I play around with it.

Thanks again,
Pauley

[Paul Benson]

Thanks Jon,
it looks like I’ll just use the HCEncoder GUI, and thus not need the AVISynth tool.

Any recommendations on the output file settings I should use in Premiere to then bring into HCEncoder? Uncompressed AVI, while ideal, would likely crater my hard drive. I do see Quicktime, but it seems to only offer DV compression, which I think may be too lossy.

Thanks,
Pauley

[Paul Benson]

Glad it worked. Don’t you love it when people don’t know how you did some trick?

Pauley