I did not quote the whole message, but the sentence immediately before what I did quote was:

"I did some research with development on this."

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Again, I want to restate that my recent experience with technical support has been good with the exception that I seem to have found a few genuine bugs lately that go into the bug tracking system for consideration in the next release. No help unless they make it up the priority list to be fixed.

See here:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=22&MessageID=682280

That's a lot of posts to read to find the one that's relevant. Could you link to the specific one in that thread that bears on this?

Rob

I posted about this same issue months ago. I gave up and now just take uncompressed (or lightly compressed) files into DVDA so that I only get one compression cycle.

I was losing time and nearly missing deadlines fooling around with it. And I most CERTAINLY was not pleased to be doing Mpeg2 BluRays. But then, doing low bitrate AVC isn't much fun either since DVD seems to crap out when you try encoding above 12-16Mbps.

It's worth reading all the way through.

It just seemed like the post you linked to and the ones adjacent didn't relate. Maybe later when I have more time to hunt. Not that you should cater to my limited time-slices :-)

Anyway, it sounds like there is no AVC formulation that DVDa will take without recompressing it and the solution is yet another intermediate (such as an uncompressed AVI or frameserved AVI). That's assuming DVDa will make it's own AVC files...

Rob

I was just able to frameserve to adobe media encoder and make a file that DVDA will ingest without recompressing. I had to change the extension from *.m4v to *.avc for it to take it but it did.

I believe if you use at least some of the bluray AVC templates in Vegas you can get DVDA to accept them w/o recompressing, but if you modify one (still to a legal format as on pg. 26 of the DVDA manual) it will recompress.

I believe if you use at least some of the bluray AVC templates in Vegas you can get DVDA to accept them w/o recompressing, but if you modify one (...) it will recompress.

That makes sense. My impression has been that you couldn't stray from Vegas' DVDa templates -ever- if you wanted DVDa to accept the files without rerendering them.

I'm still getting from this that there really aren't *any* AVC templates in Vegas that will work for DVDa without recompression. Is that the case?

Last question. If you're frameserving out to Adobe media encoder could you also frameserve directly to DVDa? (I think I see the reason why you wouldn't. DVDa would render a file for the burn but you'd not have anything to save for the DVDa project file. Right?)

Off to dinner and music...

Rob

I don't have any control over the rendering parameters in DVD Arch (other than a crude bit rate slider). Plus at least on my machine rendering there is single threaded and thus very slow.

I would have the *.ISO file after the project prep in DVDA and I could extract the rendered file using various utilities for that if I really wanted to.

As I said above, for rendering to MPEG2 for bluray I can modify a template to get what I want (1280x720-24p) and DVDA will not recompress it. For the same res/framerate if I mod an AVC bluray template then DVDA will recompress.

I know that at least some Bluray AVC templates will work w/o recompress in DVDA, I have tested that.

The problem is that until SCS pays any attention at all to the development of DVDA (if they ever do), it's at best a headache to use, and at worst a nightmare. I've spent countless hours yesterday and today conducting tests trying to get a test file encoded with x264 following the guidelines to make the stream blu-ray compliant, and no matter what I do, DVDA keeps giving me the same stupid error:

Status: TSWrapper.dll::CTSWrapper::ProcThreadMain::This program has a bug. - _ptsOfNextGOP is empty.

It does this shortly after I set it to build the project, which in this case it's just one avc file encoded with x264, one minute long, and the corresponding AC3, both of which show with a green mark in the Optimize Disc dialog.

I kept changing parameters here and there to try to get DVDA to accept it, but nothing works. After two days of trying and researching, I believe the problem may be that DVDA doesn't like files encoded with MBAFF (one of the two types of interlacing in h.264, the other is PAFF). Note that, however, MBAFF is perfectly within legal blu-ray specs, and all these files that I encoded got accepted by Encore CS4 and built without trouble at all. And I would use Encore for my project, if it wasn't that it has a bug when it comes to the implementation of the loop point, which DVDA doesn't have. But the way I see it, I'm going to have to end up using a workaround for the loop point bug and use Encore anyway, because x264 is the best h.264 encoder quality wise, and the h.264 encoders that Sony provides in Vegas and DVDA are just laughable.

The one in Vegas is OK for consumer applications, certainly it would be enough for the Platinum series, but this is a Pro app and it has a consumer grade h.264 encoder that will not go over 16 Mbps. The one in DVDA does go over 16 Mbps, but it uses 30% of the CPU. I didn't just spend $1300 in upgrading my system to let DVDA encode at that ridiculous speed.

When was the last time Sony updated DVD Architect? One year and two months ago. That shows you how important it is to them.

I am sorry that you find DVDA so difficult to use. I find it very powerful and actually easy for my weirdly wired brain. In computer terms, it is Object Oriented. That aside because everyone has a style that works better for them...

By loop point, do you mean that DVDA doesn't have a loop point capability or that it doesn't have the bug? DVDA has had loop point capability since version 4. My instructional DVD went through that feature in depth. I assume you mean it doesn't have the bug.

Can I ask why you are so locked on .h264 for your Blu Rays? I am honestly curious. I use MPEG2 for them and they look great and have plenty of room on the disk left over. DVDA doesn't seem to have much support for the AVC so the MPEG2 just seemed natural to me. I know I am missing something here.

Well I certainly don't know about 24p, but for AVC and normal 60i (1920x1080@16Mb/s) I use the standard M2TS template with NO audio, then a separate AC3 file with the pro encoder..... and I don't get any re-compressing in DVDa.

I am sorry that you find DVDA so difficult to use. I find it very powerful and actually easy for my weirdly wired brain. In computer terms, it is Object Oriented. That aside because everyone has a style that works better for them...

I don't find it difficult to use, in fact, if we talk about its interface, I'd rather use it much more than Encore, in the same way I prefer Vegas to Premiere. But it's really annoying that it's supposed to be a blu-ray authoring program and it doesn't properly support the h.264 format. I'm sure that their $50,000 Blu-Print does take these files without problem, because that's a product that they update. When a company doesn't release updates for a product that has bugs in 14 months, that tells you that they really don't care much about it.

As for the loop point, yes, I meant that DVDA doesn't have the bug that Encore has. Basically what happens is that when I play the same project from a BD-RE in the same player (Panasonic DMP-BD65), in the one authored with DVDA, it starts playing, goes through the loop point and it doesn't skip a bit. In the one from Encore, when it's close to the loop point it freezes for a second and then it resumes playing a few frames after the loop point. At the end of a title (all set to go back to the loop point) it also goes to a few frames after the loop point. It's as if Encore cuts the background video into two titles, one pre loop point and the other post loop point, and just sets an end command at the end of the first title to go to the second one, instead of leaving it as one title and playing it straight.

Unfortunately, since DVDA can't properly support the h.264 format, I will have to manually cut my menu background video into an intro video that then jumps to the main menu and still encode in Encore, because I have wasted two days in trying to get DVDA to take files encoded with x264 and it doesn't, so I can't keep wasting time.

As for MPEG2, my reason for using h.264 is that at 30 Mpbs h.264 looks much better. It would probably take 50 Mbps in an MPEG2 file to get the same quality, especially when it's interlaced video.

Below are the last two items in a long thread with SCS Technical Support back in February. My problem was DVDA would always try to recompress my 1280x720 24 AVC if I had rendered in Vegas. Surprisingly, if I dropped the .mts footage straight from the camera into DVDA it would burn without recompression. As you will see, the problem (at least for me) is with the Vegas templates, not DVDA.

Hi Jerry,

Agree DVDA is long overdue for an update. I believe if you keep the bitrate at 16mbps or below, DVDA will accept AVC files from the Vegas encoder. In practice I'm not as bitter about this as I used to be, because it's more economical to burn BluRay onto regular DVD media, and regular DVD starts stuttering at higher bitrates anyhow.

But for those who want to burn BluRay onto BluRay disks, Sony would obviously prefer you spend the $50K on their "professional" product. :)