Comments

HeeHee wrote on 2/6/2003, 1:47 AM
From what I've seen the answer unfortunately is no. I believe you can still do a VCD without menus/chapters within V4.

This is one reason I may just order V4 without DVDA or just wait and use VV3 for a bit longer. The special upgrade offers are good until March 15th.
seeker wrote on 2/6/2003, 3:54 AM
Barry,

Like HeeHee said, the answer is unfortunately NO. I personally think SoFo is missing a good opportunity here. Actually, what I want to author is MiniDVDs. Better quality than SVCD, and you get 15 to 18 minutes of full DVD quality video on a cheap CD-R.

Even though I plan to get a DVD burner in the near future and author DVDs, I still will want to author MiniDVDs for short subjects, practice scenes, "trailers", and experimental renderings mainly because good CD-R blanks cost less that 50 cents each and good DVD blanks cost way more. MiniDVDs are ideal for short high quality videos. If we could buy good DVD-R blanks for 50 cents, this wouldn't be an issue. You would just put however many minutes you wanted on the blank and leave a lot of unused space. But at the current cost of DVD blanks I can't afford to take that approach.

A lot of times your audience doesn't want to watch a two-hour production. And a lot of times you aren't ready to complete a two-hour production. Ulead has a new version of their DVD Workshop that is going to give DVD Architect some serious competition. SoFo should not arbitrarily limit the capabilities of DVD Architect, for their own good as well as for ours. They are making a big mistake by spurning the MiniDVD format. My opinion.

-- Seeker --
Paul_Holmes wrote on 2/6/2003, 4:04 AM
I believe you might be able to create a mini-DVD in Architect by using the "Prepare DVD" option which creates the files and doesn't burn. Then use your DVD burner software to burn the audio TS and video ts to the CD. At least this would work for me with my Veritas PrimoDVD software.
TorS wrote on 2/6/2003, 6:47 AM
Excuse me, I know very little about DVD.
Are you two (seeker and Paul combined) telling me that with DVD Architect I can assemble videos up towards 18 minutes, burn them on a regular CD-burner and play them back on a regular DVD player?

Tor
Jay Gladwell wrote on 2/6/2003, 7:06 AM
More exposure of my ignorance (this is a humbling forum!).

Just to make certain I'm clear on this... Once I have Vegas+DVD I still have to buy a program like DVDit or DVD Workshop to burn DVDs?
Jay Gladwell wrote on 2/6/2003, 7:20 AM
On SoFo's own website, on a page entitled "What you can do with Vegas+DVD" at
http://www.sonicfoundry.com/products/showproduct.asp?PID=810&FeatureID=6961&spid=203 at the bottom it states, "Burn using most DVD burning hardware and share your projects." It says nothing about having to buy additional software to burn DVDs. What am I missing or misunderstanding?
AlexB wrote on 2/6/2003, 7:41 AM
DVDA can burn DVD-R/-RW/+R/+RW all right on it's own, no problem, I did it. Question was, can it handle sVCDs, xSVCD, VCD etc. on an CD-RW-Drive.
Jay Gladwell wrote on 2/6/2003, 7:50 AM
Duhh...

Sorry, I guess that didn't sink in, Alex. Thanks for the clarification. By the way, how did your DVDs turn out?
AlexB wrote on 2/6/2003, 7:58 AM
Nice and crisp. Didn't try the release product yet, so it was just the trial project I tested on my Sony. Might find time tonight to install it, register and burn some of my own projects. Since I'm in Europe, that's five hours from now. I'm not quite sure, but DVD burners might be able to use CD Media with DVDA as well. Anyhow, you usually get a heap of simple DVD-burning software together with a DVD burner. So there's allways the option of preparing the necessary files in DVDA and burning the miniDVD with one of the others, that's what they said in the posting above.
SonyDennis wrote on 2/6/2003, 8:36 AM
Just to make certain I'm clear on this... Once I have Vegas+DVD I still have to buy a program like DVDit or DVD Workshop to burn DVDs?

No, DVD Architect (part of Vegas+DVD) will burn DVD-R/-RW/+R/+RW discs all by itself, no additional software required.

What these folks are talking about are "miniDVD" discs; essentially a DVD directory layout on CD-R/-RW disc. Very few set-top players play them, most just PC-based DVD playback software.

You can use the "prepare disc" features of DVD Architect to create a directory structure that can be burned to a CD using a third-party data CD burn program (or Windows XP) and used as a miniCD, if you are so inclined.

///d@
mikkie wrote on 2/6/2003, 9:45 AM
IF it helps & For what it's worth & all that...

The actual burning of a DVD, or CD for that matter, can be done by any number of CD burning programs (in fact, a lot of folks prefer the additional control you get in a program that does just that one task) - Nero & Magix are just a couple of these that can be found fairly cheaply online. To make things more convenient a lot of recent programs allow you to burn the CD or DVD inside of that program, rather then having to quit & start up your burning software. Vegas and DVDA fall into that category - you're not buying either program for it's ability to burn disks, but for video editing & DVD [menu & layout] authoring respectively.

DVDs on CD were popular in some circles, and by using other then the default mpg2 compression settings for your video, it is possible to put an hour or more of video on a CD, even more if you use the newer 90 minite blanks, overburn, etc... The quality will not be the same obviously as something done at a 3M bandwidth, but it can be acceptable. To create one you simply create a DVD layout as you would for any DVD project, use mpg2 files that are more highly compressed then the templates call for, then use whatever software to burn the created layout on a CD blank.

Some DVD authoring apps include a *portable* DVD player that can be included on your CD, and that's about the only thing they do that's special, at least re: DVDs on CD. On the other hand these players are somewhat buggy, & wmplayer 9 can play DVD's just fine if you add a couple of freeware codecs to windows, and that's assuming you don't want to spend the $10 US to get PowerDVD 4 XP online.

An added FWIW, most of the folks whom are really into the movie on CD scene use much more efficient codecs like winmedia, real, DiVX, or Xvid, so IMO including DVD on CD as a menu option is more of a marketing gimick anyway. If the content is clean enough, you can squeeze something like a 1.5 hour 640 x 356 video in RealVideo 9 format on a CD (about an hour's worth if your source is dirty) in better quality then I've seen on some poorly done commercial DVDs - you won't see a difference vs the average DVD if you have the hardware to play it back on your TV. There are a number of autorun programs that can give you the same menu layout as a DVD, & you can emulate the chapter points, though how many viewers actually use chapter points is open to debate.
WildBlue wrote on 2/6/2003, 10:37 AM
Mikkie, thanks for that great explanation. A Question: If I want to create menus and chapters for a short video, store it all on a regular CD-R, then make that CD autorun on a Windows computer, what would be the best way to do it? Use DVD-Architect to create the menus and chapters, and something else to make it autorun? Or is there a better way, such as inexpensive software that will do the menus and create the autorun? Thanks!
Ronbo wrote on 2/6/2003, 11:58 AM
To ask a bit further, based on what SonicDennis just said...
Will DVDA format a +RW disk for me? Will it erase existing-content if I want to replace it with new content? Or is this something that the actual Sony-burner software should be doing (and if so, what/where/how)?

Expansion...
I just bought the Sony 500A +/- burner, and played with it last nite. I do not have DVDA yet, I'm trying to do one step at a time and getting the hardware-upgrades out of the way first. The burner seems to be working ok since it will write information (like a .jpg or a .doc) to a regular cd, but when I tried to burn something/anything to the +RW disk that came with the burner (I neglected to purchase any other material at the time), it kept telling me the disk wasn't formatted.

The Sony information was ... well.. cryptic at best in its explanation as to what I should be doing with it.

Help!

Thanks!
seeker wrote on 2/6/2003, 9:51 PM
SonicDennis,

"What these folks are talking about are "miniDVD" discs; essentially a DVD directory layout on CD-R/-RW disc. Very few set-top players play them, most just PC-based DVD playback software."

Support for miniDVD is not as rare as you seem to imply. The VCDHelp site reported tests of 723 models of contemporary set-top DVD players, and found that 204 models supported miniDVD, so that amounted to 28% supporting miniDVD. I wouldn't call that "very few." That's nearly a third. Between my two sons and us, we have three DVD players and, as it happens, all three support miniDVD. My younger son's player does not support SVCD, however. Anyone who plans to purchase a DVD player has 204 or so models to choose from that do support miniDVD, some costing less than $100. For more detailed information on this, see

DVD Players that support miniDVD

Perhaps I don't fully understand this, but I feel that I am getting mixed signals from SoFo on this miniDVD and DVD Architect issue. A recent message thread in this forum began with the following message,

Subject: DVD Architect - No VCD/SVCD or Multimedia CD Support??

Later in that thread, I left the following message, and the thread continued as shown.

Subject: SoFo, can DVD Architect do MiniDVD ?
[ End of thread]

I am hoping that your statement that, "You can use the "prepare disc" features of DVD Architect to create a directory structure that can be burned to a CD using a third-party data CD burn program (or Windows XP) and used as a miniCD, if you are so inclined." still applies, and provides a means for us to use DVDA in the process of creating miniDVDs. Although SonicEPM's message did not seem to offer any such hope, and it had me thinking in terms of diverting my near term budget to the upcoming new version of Ulead's DVD Workshop. However, once more Sonic Foundry's special limited term upgrade offer is hard to resist, and I am now thinking strongly of purchasing Vegas 4 + DVDA before the March 15 deadline, even though I don't have a DVD burner or the budget to buy one in the next couple of months. Does anyone know specifically how to use DVDA and Nero to create a miniDVD on a CDRW drive?

-- Seeker --
SonyDennis wrote on 2/7/2003, 10:03 AM
seeker:

It is my belief that you can burn the prepare directory to a CD-R and have it play as a miniDVD, but I haven't tried it myself because my APEX AD-600A is not on that list of players that support miniDVD. Perhaps I'll see if my PC can play them.

However, the point that SonicEPM was trying to make is that although you might be able to do tricks like this, it is not a supported function of the program. If it works, great, if it doesn't, please don't call out tech support department asking them how to do it!

///d@
SonyEPM wrote on 2/7/2003, 10:05 AM
Feel free to download the "sample project for test burning only" from

http://www.sonicfoundry.com/download/step2.asp?DID=437

This is a sample of what DVDA will write to the harddrive during the prepare stage. Using your other burning tools, you may be able to burn this on a CD. This has never been tested by anyone here- might work, might not. Let us know-
seeker wrote on 2/7/2003, 11:19 PM
SonicEPM,

Feel free to download the "sample project for test burning only"

Thanks for the tip. That seems like a good experiment to try.

-- Seeker --

MarkWWW wrote on 2/8/2003, 2:10 PM
As an experiment I've just burned the sample burning project to a CD-R/W (i.e. as a miniDVD) and I find that it plays just fine on my PC DVD drive (using PowerDVD).

But it doesn't play on my standalone DVD player (a CyberHome AD-L528) - says Bad Disk). This player is supposed to be able to play miniDVDs so it might be failing because it doesn't like the software I used to burn the CD with (WinOnCD 3.6) but that's all I've got available here at home at the moment. I've got Nero and Easy CD Creator at work - I'll see if either of them give better results on Monday.
seeker wrote on 2/17/2003, 8:22 AM
SonicEPM,

" Feel free to download the "sample project for test burning only" from

Your suggestion worked just fine. My very first miniDVD from Nero using the DVDA Sample Project's VIDEO_TS file played beautifully in my Daewoo DVG-5000N standalone DVD player. And, at 20 cents, the price was right, since the sample project is actually a very short production. Actually it uses up only a few pennies worth of a CD-R and, even at a slow 4X burn rate (I used a cheap 8x CD-R), took only about 3 minutes to burn.

In the past few days I did a fair amount of Googling to research miniDVDs and how to make them with Nero. A lot of people had reported failures. Then, here in this forum, I got a "heads up" that I would need the latest version of Nero, which I downloaded. Apparently there are several ways to "roll your own" miniDVDs and no generally accepted way as to which is best. In a different forum, a participant said that the new version 5.5.10.7b of Nero "solves" the problems that people have been having in making miniDVDs with Nero. That may very well be true, but if it is, it is ironic that the "solution" was so recent.

I was delighted with the excellent picture quality and sound quality on the miniDVD made with Sonic Foundry's DVD Architect sample project. It's full DVD quality looked and sounded every bit as good as a commercial DVD and did I mention that it cost only 20 cents? The menu structure was nothing to brag about, but for such a short playing time an elaborate menu wasn't needed. I was, and am, puzzled by the "Machine Language Sound" section at the end.

I think it's too bad that Sonic Foundry purposely didn't support miniDVD/cDVD in the rollout of DVD Architect. It would have been trivially simple to add the feature. Several competitors have positioned themselves to cash in on "tiny" DVD authoring & burning. It is good news for those competitors that Sonic Foundry ignored the market potential of all those millions of CDRW drives with their low-priced media. A sea change is now occurring in the standalone DVD player market as manufacturers realize how easy and inexpensive it is to add support for miniDVD/cDVD. Anyone who persists in the mantra that few standalone DVD players support miniDVD/cDVD is just going to look foolish.

I guess I am going to be one of the very few who purchase DVD Architect to make miniDVDs. The vast majority of those who make "tiny" DVDs will buy something that says miniDVD or cDVD right on the box. Even after I purchase a DVD burner later this year, I will continue making a lot of miniDVDs for inexpensive short subjects that I can mail to various family members, sort of like greeting cards or letters from home. Everything doesn't have to be a Hollywood production. There is a definite place for 20-cent DVDs. And their low price can encourage experimentation.

-- Seeker --