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09-15-2005, 02:24 AM
bosteis bosteis is offline
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I understand that one's choice of authoring program is based on personal preference and opinion. after looking at http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=191462, it looks like "TMPGEnc DVD Author" is very popular (but so is "DVD-lab"). is this software that will not go away in the future (or is that impossible to say for any piece of software)? I see that people like "Ulead DVD Workshop" as well. people have also said that "DVD Maestro" is the best, but it's defunct. it seems that TMPGEnc looks clunky, but is powerful and stable.

I guess I'm trying to understand what apps you recommend to have in one's arsenal and what they do. I tried using Cyberlink PowerDirector at first b/c you can create different output files (streaming quicktime, avi, mpeg), but then I quickly realized that it was a consumer app with limitations. can "TMPGEnc DVD Author" used like Media Cleaner to output files at a different format/quality, or is it best used for authoring?
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  #2  
09-15-2005, 06:42 AM
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While I dearly value videohelp.com, you have to understand that much of it's audience often skews things towards cheapness and not quality. Same for easiness over quality. A great number of them (far too many if you ask me), are also more interested in illegally downloading in-theatre movies or copying the entire Netflix library, so they are only concerned with means to achieve those ends, and have no experience in content creation. Remember these things when reading reviews and polls there.

Tsunami DVD Author (aka TMPGenc DVD Author) is a nice piece of software for newbies. It's very bare bones, has a degree of flaws and bugs, but is easy to use. Cheap and easy to use, that's why it is popular. It's not very powerful and the stability also varies (for example, using it's editing features can cause loss of audio sync sometimes). Most people get disgusted with it after they get a little experience and wish to advance their abilities. The only reason I still use TDA is because it creates no-menu DVDs in about 5 minutes, and no other software on the home market can do that (at least none that I am aware of). One discs where there is only one item to play, menus are worthless.

Sonic DVDit! PE 2.5 (NOT THE 5 or 6 VERSIONS!!!!) was also a nice piece of software, and it's only real limitations were an inability to use motion menus, or to set your highlight color. The highlight color could actually be changed with some advanced tools after the disc was authored, but I never messed around with it. I used this software for 3 years and had no complaints.

Ulead DVD Workshop 2 (NOT VERSION 1!!!) is great software, I use it weekly and get professional quality results, no problem. There is little that this software cannot do, in terms of still menus, motion menus, custom buttons, transitions between menus or from menu to clip. And it has an interface that is almost equally as easy as TDA is. It does not have the archaic "engineer" style interface of the so-called "pro" software out there, much of it equal in ability to DVDWS2. This has a "heavy" price tag, but it's worth it. Compared to the other "pro" software prices, it's still chickenfeed, worth the investment. Educational discounts often have it in the $250-350 range, saves about $100-150. It has limitations on NTSCfilm 23.976 source, does not cooperate with it. If you are making new content, odds are you won't have 23.976 anyway (again, that's a complaint generated mostly from people that download movies off the Internet). It also has a bug in motion menus, where it requires progressive video (it deinterlaces interlaced menu content), my fix has been a rather easy one, to IVTC/odd combo deinterlace in TMPGENC PLUS before hand, encode out a 8MB/s 720x480 MPEG-2 file of the short menu clip (just takes a few minutes at most, no big deal). If I make a complex menu in Adobe Premiere, I do the IVTC/odd prior to importing the clip into Premiere, use VirtualDub to convert back to uncompressed AVI. Again, quick painless process. DVDWS has a great time-saving feature, as unlike "pro" software it DOES NOT REQUIRE separate audio/video streams. It will gladly accept multiplexed A/V streams, which has saved me about 30 minutes per author job since I switched to it from DVDit! and ReelDVD.

DVD-Lab is buggy software with a complex an non-intuitive interface. This software is just not very good, and no more powerful than DVDWS. People flock to it mostly due to cheap price ($99) and the fact that it will accept non-spec DVD sources (544x480 MPEG-2, for example). The author is also a bit of a snarky individual and has plagiarized information lifted from this site.

DVD Maestro is more engineering-interface antiquated software that is almost a decade old in design and functionality. In fact, SpruceUp went out of business in either 1999 or 2000 sometime, they are long gone, sold off to Apple and their tech was integrated into DVD Studio Pro for the Mac (now THAT is awesome software!). I plan to buy a Mac, someday, to get the power of DVDSP at my fingertips. As it stands now, I have to travel to the studio of a friend for any special DVDSP work I need done. Although it's not often I need DVDSP, as DVDWS can do most of what I need, including a lot of advanced work.

Sony DVD Architect and Adobe Encore are two more pieces of newer software on the scene, but neither fully support the DVD specs, so you can easily have source that it rejects. These are also rather round-about in complexity and need special attention to cooperate nicely (bugs).

Remember the cardinal rules of authoring software: NEVER DO ANYTHING MORE THAN AUTHOR IN IT! While many of these programs are now pandering to the lazy/cheap consumers ("do I really need separate software for each step?"), the quality is low because it is simply not technically possible to cram everything you need into one application. Microsoft already tried that approach with Windows. but I don't see students typing papers in MS Notepad or gamers playing Solitaire. Sure it works, but how well? Does it meet your needs? Usually not. This is why it's best to avoid those "all-in-one" types of software from Pinnacle, Cyberlink, Intervideo, and others.


So, for the direct answer, what do I suggest?

TDA is rather cheap ($50 or so) and is a great starter tool. If you want to jump right in and make discs, and don't wish to spend a lot of upfront time learning the nuances of something a little more complex, then TDA is perfect. It might also be nice to have for it's MPEG-1 authoring abilities (convert VCD to DVD), as well as the no-menu options. It's also fairly forgiving on imperfect sources that are not 100% perfect to the DVD spec (yet still really close). These are great reasons to own it.

Ulead DVDWS is an investment of money (it does have a mostly-functional free demo!), and a small time investment to become familiar with it's abilities. But ultimately, most people could buy this and never need anything else for authoring.

Now, this is just for authoring. In order to get the final video and audio files, they must be edited and encoded in something else. And I can easily suggest any number of pieces of software (give a budget too, if you can), but it'd be best to know what your sources are (tv, VHS conversions, restoring video, DV), as well as the hardware you have. If you're also lacking hardware at the moment, let's back up to that point and look at what you want to do and what kind of hardware would be good to have.

Note: As a footnote, I tend to come off rather dry when writing huge responses like these. Lot of information to cover, like to be as direct and honest as possible.

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  #3  
09-15-2005, 08:43 AM
bosteis bosteis is offline
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it looks like TDA will suffice. my time is kinda limited these days, so if/when I outgrow it as I get more proficient, I might consider moving to DVDWS. however, after reading http://www.digitalfaq.com/dvdguides/...rn/tda/tda.htm, I don't understand why "in order to get the final video and audio files, they must be edited and encoded in something else". doesn't TDA do it for you, as per the end of that article?

I guess I'm looking for the full steps (capture, prepare/edit, author, burn). to answer this you can just direct me to right links on your site to save yourself time. it looks like TDA can do video menus with sound, which is the most advanced I would possibly make a DVD.

hardware-wise, I have:
* ASUS P4C800-E DELUXE Moutherboard
* P4 3.0C GHz 800M Processor
* 1 GB Mushkin PC3200 RAM (CAS 2-3-2)
* ATI AIW RADEON 9600XT 128MB 8X
* SoundBlaster Live
* Pioneer DVR-105U
* 2 Western Digital 80GB 7200RPM drives (WD800JD)
* 4 SilenX fans in Tornado T1000 Case (from 3dcool.com)

now that you know my setup, what are the apps you would recommend as well?
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  #4  
09-15-2005, 08:51 AM
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Authoring software only authors video. It takes your ready-to-use audio and video, and then places it into the file structure of a DVD. The IFO, BUP and VOB files. Much of that is mentinoed here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/dvdguides/...burn/intro.htm

With an ATI AIW card, you can capture MPEG-2 files that are DVD-compliant and ready to use for authoring. Just follow the ATI AIW MPEG guide on this site. The only time you'd want to "stray" from that guide is to experiment was using a different resolution or bitrate. Maybe tweak the GOP to defaults instead of changing them as shown.

Overall, you have an excellent hardware setup.

Before I go further, what is your source typically going to be? Home movies on VHS? TV recordings direct from your antenna, cable or satellite? Which leads to the next question.... How much editing do you want to do? And then what is the budget, for any software that may be needed?

I'll be able to lay out a "plan of attack" for you on how to tackle your projects effectively, in the highest quality, with the least amount of time, and within whatever budget you'd like to set. A custom plan just for you.



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  #5  
09-16-2005, 06:22 AM
bosteis bosteis is offline
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hmmm. I think generally I would be performing these tasks:

* capturing from VCR
* capturing from digital cable box "Scientific Atlanta 4200HD" through the S-Video connector (I asked Cablevision and they said it is a straight digital signal, as opposed to a compressed analog signal that is decompressed by the box)
* ripping from DVD

in all cases, these captures would be either authored to a DVD, encoded for the web or encoded for viewing on a computer (which I guess would be larger DivX files? maybe 50MB files as opposed to 10MB files which would be more compressed for the web. am I talking out of my ass and don't understand?).

I see that you have experience in web work. I do some web work here and there as well (you can check out my band's website at http://www.countryclubnyc.com/). however, I am in the dark in regards to video prep for the web. and, if I was to post video, I would probably want to do it in both .mov and .wmv so that PC and Mac users can view the content. unless there is a format that can be readily viewed by both platforms (maybe mpg?).

budget I guess could potentially be $500. I'm assuming that you don't advocate downloading apps for free through P2P networks, which is why you're asking. I'm open to options once I see what they are.

it's also possible that I would be importing from a digital video camera, being that I have several friends that own cameras and do some simple editing (cutting, cropping, fades, titles, etc).

basically, I would like to be able to handle a variety of projects, but the ones listed at the top are the most likely ones. I mostly in the dark about the possible editing and encoding apps out there.

thanks for your help so far!
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  #6  
09-19-2005, 12:42 PM
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I'll address these goals one by one. First the web content....

Nicely designed site. I dig it. Always enjoy seeing well-designed work that is technilcally sound. Hopefully we can get your video content looking just as sharp.

MPEG-1 is universal. But the file size can be a bit larger than normal. For a really clean Internet download, I would suggest something slightly complex that yields awesome quality videos. This is what I do on my motion menu work in DVDWS2.

I'll write a guide in the forum for this this week sometime, complete with images. It'll involve freeware. We'll IVTC/odd deinterlace the video, to make it a nice progressive video. And then resize it and encode to any number of codecs.

You can also encode to MOV for Mac users, and WMV for Windows users. But for this to work, you have to put both of them on your site. This is what many movie trailer sites are doing. However, encoding to MOV requires purchasing of software. WMV is free. It all depends on what you want to spend.

While on this topic, yes, I do not advocate downloading pay software for free. For one thing, it usually does not work correctly, and you're unable to get needed patches and upgrades. Most good software has complex hardware keys, or is a file size that is too large to download. Those warez kiddies online mainly go after cracking demos and serial-entry software, much of which never works correctly or lacks key features. I watch people I know going this route and complaining about all kinds of things and wasting unknown numbers of hours.

It's sort of like a car. When you buy it new from the dealer (buy the software), you know it's probably going to be a great vehicle that won't give any problems for a long time. When you get it from some unknown guy standing on the street corner, you have no idea if that car will start, if the brakes are missing, if it has water in the gas tank, etc. It's not so much a matter of legality as it is functionality. Most of that easily-cracked software is so cheap ($20-50) that spending time to find a working version of it with a working serial/crack, that you'd have been better off paying the few bucks AND getting all the added support/patches/upgrades/updates.

If you're going to view these clips on a computer, meaning offline, not online clips, then I'd seriously just go and do a normal DVD. And then use DVD player software to watch them. The only time I find DIVX or XVID useful is for sending a high quality file online (couple hundred MB in size), or maybe for converting a couple of movies and putting them on a laptop for watching on an airplane. I'd say skip the DIVX/XVID. That's a format largely isolated to "sharing" illegal downloads online, rarely is it used for legitimate work.


.... I'll get to the other types of work here after I write the guide for the MPEG-1 and WMV work...

to be continued....



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  #7  
09-28-2005, 06:23 PM
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For the web conversion, using your interlaced MPEG-2 DVD captures as source, you'll need two programs and two sets of codecs:

TMPGENC (free version is fine):
http://download1.pegasys-inc.com/dow...s/TMPGEnc-2.52 4.63.181-Free.zip
We'll only be encoding MPEG-1 files.

VIRTUALDUBMOD:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/v...od/VirtualDubM od_1_5_10_2_All_inclusive.zip?download
This is a special version of VDUB that can open MPEG files.

GPL MPEG DECODER:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/g...MpegDecoder012. msi?download
My favorite free MPEG codec no longer seems to be online.
But any should do, so we'll try this one. This lets TMPGENC read MPEG-2 files.

XVID ENCODER:
http://www.koepi.org/XviD-1.0.3-20122004.exe
This will be used in VDUB to encode from MPEG to XVID.

__________________________________________________ ______


Alright, now the method.

STEP 1: IVTC/deinterlace and encode to 320x240 MPEG-1 in TMPGENC.
STEP 2: Open MPEG-1 in VirtualDub, encode to XVID.

Two steps, and that's it.
Some people may not like this method, wanting to go straight from MPEG-2 to XVID, but I'm not a fan.
I find this method of mine to yield higher quality results because I use settings that retain quality in the double-encode.

If you want, we could just stop at MPEG-1.
Or instead of XVID, do the WMV and/or MOV files.

__________________________________________________ _____

Images and settings in software to come next...
Go ahead and download/install these for now.

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