DVDA Insists on Recompression

plasmavideo wrote on 7/25/2006, 6:56 PM
This is the first time I've tried this - maybe other folks have and could pass on their wisdom.

I have some video that was recorded on a desktop Panasonic DVD Recorder onto DVD-RAM. I would like to author the clips in DVDA. They are in the .vro format, which DVDA recognizes as legit and imports. When I first imported the files, I noticed that the project size was twice the size of the combined files. When I went to prepare the DVD project, DVDA told me that the video and audio both needed to be recompressed. Odd, as the files played back on preview just fine - standard mpg (I'm assuming) with AC3 audio.

I imported one of the clips into Vegas and looked at the properties. AHA - it was 704 x 480. So, I created a new DVDA project based on 704 x 480 rather than 720 x 480, but the new project gave me the same enlarged project size and error messages.

I tried copying the file to the hard drive and renaming it with a .mpg extension in case DVDA would be happier with that, but no luck. I've also tried playing with the settings in Optimize DVD to make sure everything matches but no luck.

Checking in the documentation, I could not find anything related to this, so I'm at a standstill unless I allow recompression to take place - something I don't want to do if possible.

Any suggestions from the brain trust?

Thanks.

Tom


EDIT: I just opened one of the files in Vegas again and checked something else. The field order is listed as Upper Field First if that makes any difference. I can't see anything in DVDA that addresses field order.

Comments

bStro wrote on 7/26/2006, 4:05 AM
Just guessing here, since I've never dealt with VRO files, but I don't think the fact that DVDA recognizes them should imply that it can put them on a DVD without recompressing them. There are lots of video formats DVD can import and preview that it still has to render to proper DVD files.

Perhaps this program can give you a quicker, cleaner conversion to MPEG2 files.

Rob
plasmavideo wrote on 7/26/2006, 7:03 AM
That's interesting, Rob, as the vro seems to be a standard mpg file from all indications. It plays in mpg players, the file properties say mpg2 with ac3, so it must be something in the wrapper that's different. I downloaded the demo of the Integrator program you pointed me too and I'll see what that does.

Also, in DVDA, I can go to a standard VIDEO_TS folder and import VOB files into DVDA by selecting "ALL FILES" in the dropdown box and selecting the *.vob file that I want . DVDA recognizes them fine and does not recompress, even though that's not one of the file choices offered.

What I did to get the job done was to get a burn on a standard DVD-R off the recorder, and then extract the vob files of interest. Since the videos were all very short I didn't have to worry about the 1GB file size limit. They all were well within that size. In a nutshell, these videos were originally recorded on the hard disk in the DVD recorder, and we needed a way to get them without getting the HD recorder and hooking the analog outputs up to my capture card.

I noted that some of Ulead's DVD software will work with DVD-RAM files, so I might also check that out and see if that would be valuable as well.

This will be coming up in a number of future projects, so I need to get a handle on it now.

Doing a GOOGLE search is revealing some interesting things about the DVD-RAM and VRO format.

Thanks again for your input.

Tom