5 replies to this topic

[danny]

hallo folks,
this is my first post on this board but because I don´t really know any answer to my problem.

I´m trying to finish my first BD-project with DVDitHD at the moment on my Intel-Mac with all my data on a HFS+harddrive. I´ve got macdrive working so I could get access to this  data from my newly installed windows XP pro. I´m working under bootcamp.

the BD is constructed with one main menu (motion menu) with 3 buttons and one film with three different audio-tracks (german, englisch, and atmosphere in AC3 or PCM

the main film is 1440x1080i50 material und the menu is 1920x1080i50 that I encoded with compressor to m2vHD with it´s bluray-setting ( MPEG2HD, 25Mbit overall and 30MBit maximum.) the main feature is about 1h20min.


so far, so good.


I authored the material and started the built-a-image-process.


but what´s wrong:

1.) DVDitHD always says when I import my assets, that they are not spec-compliant
2.) when I started the built-process I always get an error-massage that an error accured (no info about it), or the user interrupted the process ( what I did not!), very short before DVDitHD will create the m2t!

could it possible that the m2vHDs that was coded with compressor are not REALLY compatible with DVDitHD?


I made a 2nd test.

I took a short film 1440x1080i50 (color-bar, 10 sek.), used the same coding-settings, took the menu as well, made a m2vHD and made a built-a-image-process with DVDitHD, that was fine !!

so what the hell is going on? It seems that it´s not possible with DVDitHD to work with long films!


could it be a solution to code the material with the new reference-encoder from mainconcept?

or

could this be a problem with bootcamp or the HFS+volumes?


what is happening with my assets when I use the transcoding-function within the  project-settings when I allready code the material, will it just be optimised or will it be coded again? I don´t want to have double-coded MPEG-material because the loose of quality.


THX for all the help.


Danny

Edited by danny, 22 March 2008 - 01:41 AM.

[plee]

hallo folks,
this is my first post on this board but because I don´t really know any answer to my problem.

I´m trying to finish my first BD-project with DVDitHD at the moment on my Intel-Mac with all my data on a HFS+harddrive. I´ve got macdrive working so I could get access to this  data from my newly installed windows XP pro. I´m working under bootcamp.

the BD is constructed with one main menu (motion menu) with 3 buttons and one film with three different audio-tracks (german, englisch, and atmosphere in AC3 or PCM

the main film is 1440x1080i50 material und the menu is 1920x1080i50 that I encoded with compressor to m2vHD with it´s bluray-setting ( MPEG2HD, 25Mbit overall and 30MBit maximum.) the main feature is about 1h20min.


so far, so good.


I authored the material and started the built-a-image-process.


but what´s wrong:

1.) DVDitHD always says when I import my assets, that they are not spec-compliant
2.) when I started the built-process I always get an error-massage that an error accured (no info about it), or the user interrupted the process ( what I did not!), very short before DVDitHD will create the m2t!

could it possible that the m2vHDs that was coded with compressor are not REALLY compatible with DVDitHD?


I made a 2nd test.

I took a short film 1440x1080i50 (color-bar, 10 sek.), used the same coding-settings, took the menu as well, made a m2vHD and made a built-a-image-process with DVDitHD, that was fine !!

so what the hell is going on? It seems that it´s not possible with DVDitHD to work with long films!


could it be a solution to code the material with the new reference-encoder from mainconcept?

or

could this be a problem with bootcamp or the HFS+volumes?


what is happening with my assets when I use the transcoding-function within the  project-settings when I allready code the material, will it just be optimised or will it be coded again? I don´t want to have double-coded MPEG-material because the loose of quality.


THX for all the help.


Danny

First, I would suggest to burn to volume (build the files to the hard drive) always, many reasons but it's pretty much the standard for everybody to do.  Next, I would use just use elementary streams as DVDit demuxing is sometimes shaky and can cause alot of mysterious errors.  Hopefully, this helps....

[SS Scott]

1) make sure you have adequate temp and overall hard drive space or the app can fail at the "adding assets to DB" stage

2) are you in a PAL project or an NTSC project?  could be if you are in NTSC that it wants to transcode to 29.97.  Does your video alone pass through to a volume or image or will video without audio tracks transcode as well?  is your audio the same length as your video?  if it is more than 15 frames longer than the video it will automatically transcode.  also, WAV audio always transcodes in the current builds...though that will be fixed in the not to distant future.

[danny]

Hallo,
first of all: happy easter to everybody.

THX for the suggestions.

@plee: I´m working as an professional DVD-Author over 7 jears, so to me it´s a normal process to work with elementary streams, especially that I have a better control over the coder, what it´s doing.

When I´m authoring a DVD (with DVD Studio Pro), I´m always do a built on my harddisk, before I write the DDP-Image to DLT-Tape for replication.

I will do this first with DVDitHD within my next test, too.


@ss scott:
1) I double-checked the whole project, to be sure there is no other setting exept 25/50i-settings and the harddrive that I used was a 400GB with 50GB content on it.

2) I was working in an PAL-poject and the video and audio-assets have the same length.

One main problem is, apples HDV codec is not a part of the win-version of quicktime and the project was made in these codec.

In the reason that DVDitHD seems not to work propperly with (PAL-)assets that are codet with apples compressor, it is neccessary to transcode the HDV-material into one other codec that would be understood by windows-quicktime.

The best way to do this is to go through the photo-jpeg. So I could take the quicktime-file and let DVDitHD do the coding of the assets, keep them and take these files to do changes on the project.

Yesterday I finished my first project by this way and it was looking good, exept the double-coded menu ( I coded it before I started DVDitHD with transcoding-function). No MUXER error.

Result: the main-film (that was a quicktime-movie) was looking good, but the double-coded menu wasn´t that nice, a lot of artefacts in the picture and not that sharp as the m2v-asset was before.


Conclusion:
It is good to see, that it´s possible to create simple in-spec-BDMV with DVDitHD, but the workflow is a little bit tricky (for mac-users), as long as (PAL)-assets would not work properly within DVDitHD.

I will test a few more encoder-settings within compessor and mainconcept reference (as soon as it is available for mac os) , if there is a possibility to get these streams working within DVDitHD.


It´s good to hear, there will be an update in the near future, but the main thing that I did not understand, was that a (different) short asset (made by compressor with the same setting) was working. I could mux the iso-image without no problems.


nice weekend


danny

[SS Scott]

Danny, your M2V menu asset will composite and transcode if you put any buttons or text on that video background.  If you want to prevent that you can do so by compositing your menu back with your text in another program like After Effects, with a Photoshop (or even PNG or TIFF) highlight layer.  if you do that, you can put an MPEG into the menu compositor and drop the highlight graphic onto the proper highlight well and have no re-encoding of your menu.

[danny]

Hallo SS Scott,
that is the way I made my menu.

I created the motion-menu with all text in it within FCP, encode it within compressor and took one of DVDit´s template-button to create my personal overlay within photoshop.

The reason, why it was transcoded, because I cheched the box within the project settings, to get a correct M2V out of my mov-file for the main video.


That is a good point to ask you another qestion: I saw that it could be possible to create animated buttons.

Does that meen it is possible to create animated button-overlays for BDs like you can do with BD-scenarist, too? OK, probably not that comfortable, but is it possible?

When it is possible, is there a special PSD-layer-structure that I have to work with and how can I edit the timing?

THX

danny

Edited by danny, 24 March 2008 - 02:09 AM.