Help needed with DVD Studio Pro 4

[Simon Glidewell]

Could anyone help me? I'm trying to burn a DVD of an HD film which has successfully been through compressor and has a file size of 1.6GB. I just want a simple burn with no menus, etc, just so the film fades in from black. Each time I try to burn the film I get an error message at the start of the formatting stage and the blank DVD ejects - see the attached screenshots. I've set up everything correctly (I believe) in preferences. Any suggestions?

Cheers
Simon

[Olof Ekbergh]

It seems like your DVD drive is rejecting your media. Try a different brand.

I have had this happen a few times. Usually a different disc will work.

Can you burn a DVD in Finder?

[Simon Glidewell]

Thanks for the info Olof. What do you mean by a different brand of DVD drive? Do you mean using a PC? I use a MacBook Pro laptop. I have burnt films (shot in DV) successfully on this machine (edited in FCP) and in DVD Studio Pro 4. So any other ideas?

Cheers
Simon

[Shaun Roemich]

Olof is suggesting trying a different brand of DVD blank. And I concur. I had a bad batch of Taiyo Yuden (which are GENERAL thought to be the highest quality/most compatible) that would spit out routinely.

On a related note: in the Disc menu, you did set up First Play to your Track, correct?

[Simon Glidewell]

Hello Shaun. Yes I remembered to add the track to 1st play. What I fear though is having to spend money on yet more possibly unusable RW DVDs! Could there be some other reason for this problem? As I say the burning process gets as far as the formatting stage then rejects the DVD; it muxes (compiles?) everything OK then as soon as the formatting starts - wallop! I'm pulling my hair out here because a lot of people are waiting to see the film...

All the best
Simon

[Christopher Drews]

Test the media outside of DSP. Burn a disc in Toast or in OS X. If that works you know it is an error in DSP.

I would also burn to a directory first (also called build and burn).
It is also good practice to delete the menu if you intend to only play the track (which you do).

Try these things first.
-C

[Simon Glidewell]

Cheers Chris - I'll try those suggestions. Anyway I've now got some new Sony DVDs and Studio Pro will now format the disc successfully (writing the image, etc) but that's as far as it will go. The film is not burnt onto the DVD. Also I notice that nothing plays in the simulator now (yesterday it did!); it's as though the track is empty but when I play the video in the timeline it shows up perfectly well. If anyone can offer assistance I'd be most grateful as I feel I am nearly there but that I am making a basic mistake somewhere. One other thing; when I took the film through Compressor it saved the production into three assets - the video in MPEG 2 and two sets of sound one of which is rejected by DSP (an AIFF version of the sound track, as opposed to the Dolby track which DSP accepts). Does this help explain the problem?

Thanks
Simon

[Simon Glidewell]

I seem to have sorted the problem at long last! I've now burnt the DVD successfully. However, when I play back the film on my MacBook Pro the quality is far from what I would call high definition - more like low definition. The same was true when I was editing the film in FCP; rather fuzzy looking images (not aided by noisy camera footage from one camera - we used two different cameras) and not the sharp high contrast images one sees on large HD televisions. Is this just the computer screen (my laptop is the first generation of the MacBook Pro line) and would the image look better played on HD equipment? Please say yes! By the way, I set DSP to make two passes of the video images in preferences.

Many thanks again
Simon

[Olof Ekbergh]

DVD's are not HD.

There is also the GIGO rule (garbage in/ garbage out). If it does not look good editing, making a DVD will not make it better.

Compressor and DVD SP are not very good at doing clean compression, even worse with noisy video. Try using Bitvice products to clean up video and compress, you will be impressed with the difference.

Also to really see what is going on you really need to monitor on a TV / monitor not computer screen and to use scopes to make sure levels are right.

There is a lot to making a DVD that looks really good, but it has to start with really clean properly CC'd and graded footage.

I don't mean to discourage, but you may need to study and do some more testing to produce really great looking DVD's.

[Martin Mayer]

Originally Posted by Simon Glidewell

I....I've now burnt the DVD successfully. However, when I play back the film on my MacBook Pro the quality is far from what I would call high definition - more like low definition. The same was true when I was editing the film in FCP; rather fuzzy looking images (not aided by noisy camera footage from one camera - we used two different cameras) and not the sharp high contrast images one sees on large HD televisions. .....

Sounds like your footage capture to FCP wasn't HD, and your burn to DVDSP wasn't HD. What format is your original footage?

BTW: DVDSP can only burn limited HD-DVD format discs - your disc sounds almost certainly like a standard definition DVD, and a crummy one, at that.

As Olof suggests, you need to: (a) read up some more on what is/is not possible, (b) tell us more about the formats you're using and hoping to output.

[Simon Glidewell]

Thanks for your replies everyone. We shot HDV footage on two cameras; a Canon XL-H1A and an HDV Sony camera. My friend was using the Sony (I can't remember which model it was) and I was using the Canon. My camera settings during the bulk of the filming were:

HD as opposed to SD
Aperture priority and in full manual mode
25p frame rate
Cine gamma 2 (which stated it was for video transferred to film) - probably a very bad choice?

The subsequent footage from my camera was very noisy in low light conditions (gain was set to 0 btw) and in wide angle very soft. My friend's footage was far superior with little or no noise and he had his camera in full auto mode. I then captured all the Canon and Sony footage from my camera (the above Canon model) into FCP 5.1.4 and proceeded to edit. The Sony footage always looked good during the editing whereas only some of the Canon footage looked good. However, now I have burnt the DVD of the film onto a Sony 4.7GB RW disc (5DPW120AD2) both sets of footage look mediocre. In Compressor I set this to compress at best quality 90 minutes HDV 1440/1080i.

I did a reshoot with the same Canon camera of some of the worst footage in the film. I adjusted the settings thus:

HD format
Manual mode and aperture priority
Adjusted the back focus of the lens using the menu option
Set the camera to shoot at 50i
Set the gamma to cine gamma 1

Admittedly the resulting image was an improvement over the previous shoot but the quality was still well below what I would say is a good looking HD image. The re-shoot had soft focus, poor colour saturation, low contrast and still quite noisy. It is very perplexing and I'm wondering if the camera's video head is out of alignment? The camera was brand new before the shoot and we used high quality Sony HDV tapes. Any thoughts about all of this/suggestions would be most welcome.

Cheers
Simon

[Martin Mayer]

Sounds like you've captured HDV OK, assuming no down-conversion in-camera was used when capturing. However, the shooting conditions don't sound too good. But:

Originally Posted by Simon Glidewell

...In Compressor I set this to compress at best quality 90 minutes HDV 1440/1080i....

Not sure that Compressor setting exists. Compressor doesn't produce HDV, it produces things like MPEG-2 (for SD-DVD) or H.264 for HD-DVD (bad idea - HD-DVD is a dead format).

Still sounds to me like you've made a SD-DVD.

BTW: you also can't judge the quality of your HDV footage on the FCP Canvas on your desktop.