DVD players have different setups. Mine has settings for Movies, Animation, etc. This affect how the colors and black levels appear. It might be the setups of the DVD players do not match.

Dave T2

Riredale,

Ditto on the setup as Dave T2 said. I am sure you used the same TV for both tests.
Question regarding your success rate in terms of compatibility. I checked here but you haven't posted yet:
http://www.mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=223420&Replies=19&Page=1

...so I am curious as to your success rate in terms of compatibility with your customer's players. I have two burners, a Pioneer 104 and a 105 same as you. I have been unable to get a 100% success rate. I use DVDA for burning and only Japanese made media which has worked the best for me. Maybe DVDA isn't the best for burning?

I would also really appreciate it if you would give any specifics as to your settings when you render to Mpeg 2 and subsequent settings in DVDA.

Thanks,
John

DVD players do default to different setup levels unfortunately. As a matter of interest, there is a cheap Sony player (the DVP-NS325 I believe) that has a menu setting to change the setup from 0 IRE to 7.5 IRE.

Regards...

Al

Okay, I'll do some digging into the "setup" menus and see what I find. I did look briefly and hadn't seen anything obvious such as the "black level: 0 or 7.5IRE" setting, which would explain things.

I have looked at the trial version of DVDA, but have never used it, though it seems like a good, solid product. I have managed to purchase various bits of pieces of software (often through eBay) that allow me to do some more-involved stuff.

When I finish my avi's in Vegas I run them through CinemaCraft, which is a very good MPEG2 encoder. The project I just finished is 3 1/2 hours on 2 DVD-R blanks (1.5 hours of movie on Disk 1, the remaining 1 hour on Disk 2, and an additional hour of "Bonus tracks" also on Disk 2). The average bitrate for Disk 2 is thus 600/120= 5Mb/sec, minus .2 for the Dolby stereo, or 4.8Mb/sec. I set CinemaCraft to "0" for minimum, 4.8 for average, and 9 for maximum, and run it through 3 times.

I burn with a Cendyne/Pioneer -05 (4X) and have stuck with using only Ritek G04 DVD-R blanks. I screwed up with my original estimate for the Disk 1 running time and wound up putting 4,696,000,000 bytes on the disk (limit is 4,700,000,000), or 99.9% full; amazingly, the Ritek disks are so consistent that they all burn (and play) just fine. Still, I wouldn't recommend filling a disk quite this full.

The finished mpv, ac3, and bmp (menu) files are authored with a terrific program called Maestro I bought via good-old-eBay. Maestro isn't a commercial product any more--Apple bought the company 2 years ago and set the programmers to work converting it for just Mac use. It just came out as DVD Studio Pro 2. Anyway, my movie has motion menus (made completely within Vegas) and a second audio commentary track. The authoring program delivers a VIDEO_TS folder, which I pull into Nero 5.5 and burn at 4X.

Although purists may scream, I attach labels to my disks. I use only Meritline glossy labels ($16 for 100) and print them with an Epson C80 printer, which is one of very few that use only pigment ink. The resulting labels are smearproof, UV resistant, and waterproof. Well, the ink is waterproof, not the label. I attach the labels carefully using a Stomper tool and a plain old rolling pin, sandwiching the disk between a thick and thin cloth (thin on the bottom). The resulting disks look beautiful and I think (hope) they will stay that way for many years.

As for compatibility, I just am delivering the disks now, so I don't have any feedback, but the last project in May was created in a similar fashion, and there were two failures out of about 50. One failure was on an older (and expensive) DVD player that had probably been leading-edge technology in the late 90's. The other failure was, I think, a fairly recent Sony player. It's possible that a +R disk would have played fine on those machines; I never tried it.

Hmmm, I seem to have gotten a bit verbose here; sorry. Anyway, I continue to be amazed that we can do this kind of stuff using inexpensive PC's and other bits and pieces these days. Vegas is an incredibly robust and sophisticated product. For this last project my PC had 800GB hanging off it, and towards the end I was out of space (again). 800GB! That's more than most corporations had on their mainframes not too many years ago...

Thanks for that info. Very helpful. Which version of Cinemacraft are you using?

John