Tim Kurkoski
Forum Replies Created
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How are you exporting your animations out of AE? File format, codec, resolution, pixel aspect ratio, etc.
RE: the duration, there’s no restriction on your animation. Do you have an audio background on the menu? If so, make sure it’s the exact duration of your animation, otherwise Encore will cut off the end of whichever is longer.
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How many set-top DVD players have you tried? Some players, mostly older ones, have troubles reading burned discs. You should always test your discs on as many players as possible. A good trick is to go to an electronics store and try all the models there.
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You don’t need to upgrade your audio card to create multichannel audio. You might need it if you want to hear the audio separated to different speakers, though. If you can see the beeps in the correct channels, that’s probably good enough for what you’re doing.
You can export multichannel audio in a couple of ways. Premiere Pro can make a 6-channel (5.1 = 5 discreet channels + 1 LFE = 6 channels) WAV file by using File > Export > Audio, or you can export through the Media Encoder to a Dolby Digital .ac3 file. The problem with the WAV file is that there’s not much you can do with it. Encore only takes .ac3 files for multichannel audio. The problem with the Dolby encoder is that what comes with Premiere Pro is only a demo version of the Minnetonka SurCode encoder. You get 3 tries, then you have to pay to unlock the plug-in for further use.
RE: submixes – this for mixing audio and applying effects or volume changes to multiple tracks at once. They don’t apply to what you’re doing.
What you want is a sequence with a 5.1 channel master track. Drop your beeps in as mono tracks, and mix them so that they are in the right channels. It sounds like you’ve done that already, so all you need to do is export.
You can’t encode just “four mono channels” onto a DVD. They all have to be packaged together as a Dolby (or DTS, but Encore doesn’t read those) audio file. The SurCode encoder does have an option to do a 4-channel file (use 2/2 for the Audio Coding Mode). Just make sure your beeps aren’t bleeding over to the LFE, and you should be fine.
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No. Rendering the timeline only renders preview files. Preview files are only useful for a) seeing what your sequence looks like (if real-time previews aren’t cutting it), or b) exporting back to DV tape. If you export to a different format, that requires a complete re-render of the timeline anyway.
RE: the “failed to return a video frame” problem, it’s a bug with the MainConcept encoder. There’s a patch on MainConcept’s web site you can download:
https://www.mainconcept.com/adobemedia/downloads.html -
It depends on how you want the user to be able to navigate the DVD. It’s not really a matter of efficiency. (Well, it’s far easier to manage chapters than multiple timelines, but I assume you’re asking about the user’s experience.)
Do you want the users to have the option to watch the whole act or to watch each dance individually, and then have the DVD return to the menu afterwards? If yes, each dance needs to go in it’s own timeline. Then set up the acts using a playlist.
If you don’t need that, and just want to have chapters for each act, then just put each act into it’s own timeline and place chapter poitns on each dance. This usually more intuitive for you and the user, the downside being that you have to use that pesky “menu” button on the remote if you want to get back to the menu after watching any particular chapter. 😉
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* Try different media. Try -R instead of +R or vice versa. Try a different brand of discs.
* Keep the bitrate of your video low. Some DVD players (mostly older models) have problems reading video from burned DVDs that exceeds about 7.0 Mbps.
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What’s probably happening is that the DVD player is jumping to the next timeline as it was built on the DVD, as opposed to the order you’ve arranged them in the playlist.
Encore numbers each timeline as you create it, and that’s also the order they get built in on the DVD. Encore doesn’t allow you to control this order. If you want to change it, you have to delete your timelines and build them in the order you want them to be played.
Complicating this is the fact that when you press the next chapter button, and there isn’t a chapter point to go to, there is no definition in the DVD specification that tells the DVD player what to do. (Jumping to the next timeline is the default behavior most DVD players use, but some just won’t do anything.)
You can get around the problem by putting a chapter point a second or two before the end of each timeline. That way when you press the next chapter button at the end of a timeline, it should jump to that chapter point, and then there’s just a small delay before the timeline ends and the end action is committed.
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Hmmm… What application are you using to encode the MPEG files?
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Try setting the poster frame for the button ahead a couple of frames.
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There are a couple of ways to do a slide show.
First, you can simply drop a bunch of pictures in a timeline. The upside to this is that you can have continuous music or narration, and you can navigate using the next/prev chapter buttons easily. The downside is that the slides will eventually time out (you can make them really really long, though).
The other way to go is to make a menu out of each slide and link them together. Long and tedious, but gives you total manual control.
You should also set up buttons for navigation. The way I’ve done this in the past is to make a menu template and add it to the Library palette. On the menu I put three buttons: back (left arrow), next (right arrow), and null. The null button goes between the arrows. Set the null button as the default, and the left/right buttons to Auto-Activate. In Photoshop I turn off the visibility of the button artwork, and delete all content from the highlight layer. This way the buttons are invisible, and when the user presses the left/right navigation keys on the DVD remote control, it auto-selects the prev/next buttons, and the next slide appears without any intrusion or highlights.