Comments

bcbarnes wrote on 6/4/2003, 10:01 AM
I've done a little, and have liked the results, but 99% of the people that will be watching the DVD's I make are parents and aunts and uncles, etc., who are not into "home theatre" stuff, so I tend to stick to AC-3 stereo.
jandkw99 wrote on 6/4/2003, 11:03 PM
I have just "finished" *reads done my first render - other than tests* of a 5.1 home video. I found the help & tutorials (or lack of both) made me give the thing a go without knowing what technique I should really be employing to take a stereo recording and make it 5.1.

What I have done is this:

I have 3 sound tracks - The first is the front centre channel, the second are the "surround" speakers (FL, FR, RL & RR) and finally a music track which has any background music I am using.

The main amount of work has been "cutting" up the clips and separating backgound noise into the surround channels and keeping the voices directed at the camera in the center channel. Mainly I've been using Sound Forge to copy the background noise in a short clip and then stretching (looping) it on the second track (at a lower volume). I am yet to see how the finished product is - I'm rendering it as we "speak" and will know better on the weekend.

Along with this I have the Master Surround Bus and an LFE (ie. the LFE only option set) one.... I don't quite understand these. I only added the LFE bus since I couldn't see any activity on the LFE meter when playing the movie unless I set the "LFE only" option. This caused me to add a new bus and set it....

Perhaps someone has some ideas and/or references for how I should be doing this better. I had difficulty finding any clear instructions on this type of operation. There were articles on Mastering (which is what I originally believe this type of thing was called) but I think Mixing is the more appropriate term and I'll go looking for this next time.
Bill_Wood wrote on 6/5/2003, 11:11 AM
My use of Vegas 4 + DVD Architect is almost exclusively to produce Dolby Digital 5.1 DVD's from old quadraphonic pipe organ reel-to-reel tapes. I find the results very impressive and a good way to bring old one-of-a-kind quad tapes back to life.

I transfer the four quad channels from an AKAI GX-630D-SS quad reel-to-reel recorder via an M-Audio Delta 66 sound card using Vegas 4c to record four WAV channels. Then I add two additional tracks using the front quad channels to produce a Low Frequency Effects 0.1 track to add to the other four Dolby Digital 5.1 channels. I leave the Center channel off as it does not add much to music reproduction.

To monitor the 5.1 mix I feed six audio channels from the computer sound card to direct six channel inputs of a Sony STR-DE885 Receiver which feeds four JBL 4408 near-field monitors and a Velodyne HGS-18 subwoofer. add a video track to include still photographs and to title music selections.

After I like the mix I render a video-only mpeg with event markers for the Chapter Stops then render the 5.1 audio stuff to ac3 files, making sure to click the tie similar audio and video files together so DVD-A will import both at the same time. I use a menu based DVD setup to allow the selection of different recording sessions. I can put about 8 hours of Dolby Digital 5.1 music on a 4.7 GB DVD-R this way. That is due to the compression of the MPEG and AC3 files when rendering in Vegas 4 + DVD

Bill
and 5.1 ac3 files