DVDA is driving me NUTS

farss wrote on 3/9/2004, 8:38 PM
I'm trying to Prepare this rather tricky DVD. Has a maximum size motion menu background which takes DVDA over an hour to encode. Fair enough, no dramas there.
But I also have about 13 already encoded clips. Now DVDA get as far as 2 of 13 and has a dummy spit, invalid mpeg 2 file type. OK fair enough, idiot me probably made a boo boo. EXCEPT how the hell do I figure out which file is causing the grief. DVDA decides that just telling me about the problem and stopping isn't good enough, for some stupid reason it has to delete everything it's created including the folder it was doing the Prepare into.

So anyone know how I identify what 2 of 13 is?

So far I've lost a day on this and the client is SCREAMING, my only option seems to be to try re-encoding each one of the files in turn, go back and try to prepare and see if I've fixed it, except each iteration of that process takes over 1 hour.

I've tried various ways of looking at each one of the generated mpeg files and they all look legit. Optimise reports no problems either.

Any help much appreciated.

Comments

PeterWright wrote on 3/9/2004, 8:47 PM
What a bugger Bob,

How about having a "Test" project with a plain menu, and just import each single MPEG2 in turn and see if it prepares with just that clip - may be the best way of finding the "rogues"

Good luck
farss wrote on 3/9/2004, 9:01 PM
Peter,
are you certain you're not my missing twin brother. I'd just hit "Post" and then I had the same flash of inspiration.

Just for a laugh I re-encoded the first clip on the submenu and tried to Prepare a DVD minus the motion background and it went through OK.

I'll go back to the original DVDA project with the motion background and see what happens. Maybe I've got lucky!

Even so you'd think SoFo could have made this a bit easier to diagnose or that Sony would have devoted some resource to fixing some of the obvious twitchiness of DVDA
farss wrote on 3/10/2004, 7:35 AM
Well I found the problem, following Peters idea I copied the DVDA project to a new one, dleted the long looping menu and then started deleteing video object until there was none left, just two empty menu screens with some text and it still went pear shaped.
It turns out one of the menu screens had its type set to From Project, changing it to PAL even though the project was PAL fixed the problem.
Someone up there though doesn't like me doing this job!
After I'd fixed it up, I started off a new Prepare, 55 minutes in at 90% we had a brown out for 2 seconds and the PC reset.

Finally got the thing finished, can sleep easy now, except I know this client, they'll be ringing me at 7 AM, how much should I charge for aggravation?
johnmeyer wrote on 3/10/2004, 7:57 AM
... how much should I charge for aggravation?

How much should you charge the client? Or, how much should you charge Sony?
farss wrote on 3/10/2004, 1:42 PM
Well at least The Sony thing is a once off, damn client keeps coming back,
farss wrote on 3/10/2004, 2:37 PM
Just realised another oddity in DVDA. Everyones been complaining about how it alwyas returns to the root menu. Well it doesn't if you play a clip from a sub-menu, control returns to the submenu and there it sits.
This is a real pain becuase we need it to go back to the root menu where the background video is what has to run by default.

Hopefully the next version will give us some basic control over end actions.
SonyEPM wrote on 3/10/2004, 5:12 PM
farss: were all of your clips encoded as DVD MPEG-2 files by Vegas (or by DVDA)? Or were these files from somewhere else?
farss wrote on 3/10/2004, 5:30 PM
All clips were encoded as DVD MPEG-2 files by Vegas using the PAL DVD template. Exception was looping motion menu background, that was encoded from Vegas rendered AVI in DVDA.

But the problem still occurred after I'd removed ALL clips from the project. The problem was due to one of the menus having Video Format set to "From Project". Changing it to "PAL" made the problem go away.