DVD & Digital Camera Experiences

The more recent studio is supposed to be more amenable to VBR encoding from TMPGENC. However, the three mpegs I imported had different VBR settings, so Studio started to re-encode them. Bummer.

So I avoided Pinnacle Studio again and used DVD Complete to do my work successfully. I am still disappointed that Pinnacle bought and killed DVD Complete.

Made 3 DVDs of TV shows. One DVD had 3 half hour shows and I had 2 mpg's and one that was mp2/m2v split streams. Studio had a cow on the split stream and died a miserable death.

So, I used Dazzle DVD Complete for capture, TMPGENC for 2 pass VBR encoding, and DVD Complete DVD creation.

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

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

My epinion review of Studio

I created a dvd of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with TMPGENC and DVD Complete. It turned out well.

Started a project for all of the May family footage a while back on a prior Studio beta. Had to abandon it after audio out of sync problems and due to being too busy several weeks ago.

Picked it back up and generated an AVI with Studio, used TMPGENC to encode at a little under 6KMbps video, 128Kbps mpeg audio, and created DVD file with DVD Complete. Looked pretty good when I got done. A little fuzziness in some areas (faces) during complex images (like rose bushes in background) that I haven't noticed at higher video bitrates. I bet the studios have equipment that permits them to tell the encoders to better encode the faces or whatever focus of viewer attention the producer deems appropriate. I told TMPGENC's wizard to adjust the video VBR so that it would consume 99% of the DVD-R.

When I got done creating the VIDEO_TS dir with DVD Complete, I had 300M left to put digital still images. I used RecordNow to create a DVD with my still image archive (raw image files). Unlike my previous production, I did not put the stills in the DVD video footage since I didn't want to degrade the overall video quality.

I guess Studio is out until they fix known mpeg audio OOS problems. I would love it if it would work. At least it can create AVIs and does not crash as much as it used too.

M

Created two DVD's over the last few days. Spent several hours with the Pinnacle Studio (8.7.23 beta) importing and reviewing footage as well as creating a sitcom-like intro clip with "Starring..." titles. When I burned the DVD, I found that Studio had botched the audio sync. Luckily I was able to recover the work by having Studio output an AVI, which I subsequently encoded with TMPGENC and created the DVD with DVD Complete. Studio has great titling, audio management, scene transitions, etc., but is it too much to ask to actually create a dvd with the audio in sync? What is the point if it cannot do that? Studio needs a reverse feature in addition to its slow motion and fast motion capabilities. I made one clip where we slid "up" a big blow-up slide by running the video camera backward while capturing, but it had many artifacts in it.

For the second DVD, I used microsoft windows movie maker to create the AVI. I really like MWMM.

I might have squeezed both onto one dvd, particularly since I ended up using TMPGENC anyway. But, I was concerned at a possible lack of quality for permanent storage of these home movies if I had the average bitrate at half the max (4mbps). I don't mind 6Mbps, but anything lower for permanent storage is below my comfort zone since I reuse my tapes.

I had room left to archive the originals of the 300+ digital still pictures on one of the DVDs. I also put all the stills in the dvd content for ease of viewing by non-techies.

Latest cheapest 4X DVD-R with white labels - 50 pack at Americal for $72 (including ground shipping). esbuy.com lost at $88 (with ground shipping).

My DVD Authoring Page