Monday, August 25, 2003
Pinnacle buys Dazzle's consumer video products!
Bummer. Hopefully Pinnacle can't find a way to break my existing Dazzle DVD Complete application, one of the few good DVD production pieces of software that I have found. DVD Complete is capable of splitting chapters in pre-encoded mpegs, such as mpegs created with TMPGENC. DVD Complete has been amazingly reliable. Studio is great, but it lacks 2 pass VBR encoding, is generally unreliable, and has a poor track record of importing mpegs. Hopefully Pinnacle will follow the Dazzle development processes and learn enough to start producing some reliable software.
M
M
Friday, August 15, 2003
Summer Home Movie to DVD
I took footage from 4 tapes, with about 1. 5 hours of footage.
Two of the tapes needed to have stuff removed, so I brought them into Pinnacle Studio, split scenes by time, removed bad sections, and output into AVI. I downloaded the new Studio beta, but since Studio won't do 2-pass VBR, I didn't use it for MPEG encoding. I thought about bringing the mpegs into Studio, but decided to use DVD Complete to get subchapters.
Then I took the three AVIs and batch processed with TMPGENC to create a 6,500Kbps video and 160Kbps audio. Then I put that into DVD Complete, split subchapters, created a menu,
I had to return the Americal 4X's I bought because I couldn't get them to play in my player. Then the ESBUY 4X's I bought wouldn't burn at 4X and when they did, they wouldn't play. How odd. I burned 75 4X's from ESBUY with no problem. When I burned at 2X they burned and played no problem. Bummer, a 30 minute instead of a 15 minute burn.
I have had many emails from folks, thanks for writing. One person asked about my comment about how inserting stills into a dvd lowers quality, and I responded that once you reach the capacity of the DVD media, every additional second of footage that you add to your DVD forces you to reduce the video bitrate. Thus, if you add 5 or 10 minutes of a still slideshow into the dvd footage, then it will force you to lower the overall bitrate.
M
Two of the tapes needed to have stuff removed, so I brought them into Pinnacle Studio, split scenes by time, removed bad sections, and output into AVI. I downloaded the new Studio beta, but since Studio won't do 2-pass VBR, I didn't use it for MPEG encoding. I thought about bringing the mpegs into Studio, but decided to use DVD Complete to get subchapters.
Then I took the three AVIs and batch processed with TMPGENC to create a 6,500Kbps video and 160Kbps audio. Then I put that into DVD Complete, split subchapters, created a menu,
I had to return the Americal 4X's I bought because I couldn't get them to play in my player. Then the ESBUY 4X's I bought wouldn't burn at 4X and when they did, they wouldn't play. How odd. I burned 75 4X's from ESBUY with no problem. When I burned at 2X they burned and played no problem. Bummer, a 30 minute instead of a 15 minute burn.
I have had many emails from folks, thanks for writing. One person asked about my comment about how inserting stills into a dvd lowers quality, and I responded that once you reach the capacity of the DVD media, every additional second of footage that you add to your DVD forces you to reduce the video bitrate. Thus, if you add 5 or 10 minutes of a still slideshow into the dvd footage, then it will force you to lower the overall bitrate.
M
