DVDA Studio 3: Crippled Beyond Usefullness?

jmcmike wrote on 11/25/2005, 8:24 PM

He there. I have used an older version on Sonic Foundry Vegas Studio for a while now and I upgraded to Movie Studio + DVD primarily to get the trimmer. I figured that DVDA Studio would be a bonus since I was already comfortable with both Nero Vision Express and TMPG DVD Author for DVD authoring.

So I fire up DVDA Studio and at first I am impressed. Great interface, some advanced capability for adding and positioning media (startup clips etc) looks good right? Well, I thought so too until it because painfully obvious (through much searching and belly aching) that Sony has done much to cripple this product to the point of rendering it useless for all but the most simple projects.

So here's my beef. DVDA Studio only seems to allow PCM audio. I can fogive not including an AC3 encoder and I guess if I need to I can live without an MPEG2 audio encoder but that's not the issue, because as I said, DVDA Studio doesn't *allow* anything but PCM audio. I can feed it compliant AC3 muxed in an MPG and it will insist on encoding it to PCM (or so it seems, I haven't tried to output anything but the dialogs make it pretty clear.) Also, in this scenario it claims that the video is not compliant. It's compliant for my two other authoring apps but not for this one.

So, if anyone has information to make me look stupid please bring it on. I would rather be wrong and therefore happy with the software than have to write it off.

Comments

jmcmike wrote on 11/25/2005, 8:37 PM

I think the video compliance issue is due to the source MPEG is 24P. DVDA Studio, in it's infinite wisdom, is insisting on reencoding the file because it simply *has* to to a 29 fps project. Yeesh!

Why bother with the great interface and similar powerful features of the full package if you're going to point your users into a box?

"You will make all of your projects 29.97 fps with PCM audio, so sayeth the Sony!"

ChristerTX wrote on 11/27/2005, 7:09 AM

Hi,
You might want to post this in the DVDA forum. There might be more expertise there.

Christer

kitekrazy wrote on 11/29/2005, 8:37 PM

I think the title pretty much says it all. I have to rely on Nero to burn 1.5 hour movie on a DVD disc.

jmcmike wrote on 11/29/2005, 9:02 PM

Update: I think it is *rightly* (if you can call it that) reading the source file as 23.976 fps. Since it has the 3:2 pulldown flag, the resulting fps is 29.97 but DVDA is *smart* enough to see through all that and bring about the pain, just for you, the customer.

However, I noticed that if you feed it a system MPG file with AC3 audio multiplexed with the video, it *does not* re-encode the audio and leaves the AC3 stream intact in the DVD.

I have made a separate post in the DVDA forum in hopes of getting help with the video reencoding issue.