low audio in some tracks playing on home DVD player

mikeryan1492 wrote on 12/21/2004, 7:15 AM

HI... I am having audio problems when recording to DVD.

Here's whats going on:

Have Sony Hi 8 video cmacorder, Dazzle DVII capture card, Movie Star captture software, Sony Movie Studio +DVD for editing and arcitect for creating DVDs.

I capture mpeg2 files using Dazzle & MovieStar. I edit them with Movie Studio, then create DVD with Architect.

Playback is perfectly fine when previewing in architect, and when playing rendered DVD on home computer. However, when I play DVD on home DVD player to TV, The audio track I recorded has extreemly low volume (If I turn up TV volume all the way I can barely hear the audio). During editing I added some audio effects (some dowloaded and some from audio effects CD). These audio effects have proper volume when played on either computer od home DVD player.

I have tried various things to fix volume problem, but none worked. Among the things I tried were: write to DVD + and DVD - disks; re-normlize audio captured from dazzle; move audio to separate track; adjust audio volume up and down by several decibels. I even downloade at demo copy of Pinnacle Studio 9 , edited the same mpeg2 files, created DVD using pinnacle, and had same audio problem.

I saw in Vegas 5 forum some appends of audio problmes that looked similar, and fix there was to set audio rendering to -31. I couldn't find this setting wtih Movie Studio.

Any help would be greatly appreciated... I 'm trying to creade DVD of old home movies for my kids for Xmas and am running out if time!!!

thanks
Mike

Comments

gogiants wrote on 12/21/2004, 10:30 AM

You've certainly tried all the things I would try!

One thought that may not be practical: Is there any way to capture the footage into AVI format instead of MPEG? The fact that the other audio effects sound OK would lead me to believe it has something to do with the capture process on the other footage.

mikeryan1492 wrote on 12/22/2004, 8:18 AM

yeah... I agree it must have to do with the way audio is encoded from dazzle.

movieStar has limited set of recording settings. the only way I could capture OK video was to use MPEG2 capture encoding (MPEG1 and others gave lousy picture quality).

Using movieStar, I tried recording just audio . Audio sampling rate set to 48000, bitrate set to 224000. With that, again I had situation of audio plays fine in preview, rendered dvd has extremely low volume when played on hitachi dvd player, rendered dvd has appropriate volume when played on computer dvd player.

I tried to capture using Movie Studio. Movie Studio saw dazzle capture card, but when I tired to capture using it, Movie Studio said it couldn't bacause device was in use. Pinnacle had same problem of saying device in use. Must be some startup stuff from Dazzle that takes control of device.

any thoughts????

mikeryan1492 wrote on 12/22/2004, 9:56 AM

aarrrrgghhh...

found the problem... It turns out that both my vcr and camcorder have a single audio output cable. I plugged that into right audio of Dazzle capture box. I guess that means left audio was floating. Mpeg played on computer handled this ok... DVD player didn't...

So what I did was plug lleft audio into turned off audio source.

with that config (video from camcorder, right audio from camcorder left audio to turned off audio source, I can record , render dvd and play dvd on home dvd player.

so from now on I will record to dazzle either using connecter to off audio source for left input or find some kind of splitter so mono camcorder source will be sent to both left and right dazzle inputs.

I wonder if there is a way to remove left audio track from mpeg so that I can use the set of MPEG2's I have already copied with dazzle....

gogiants wrote on 12/22/2004, 10:09 AM

Not sure if it will do what you need, but you can use the audio "pan" envelope feature in Movie Studio to change the balance between left and right channel. You could pump up the side you have and maybe that would do what you want once you re-render?

mikeryan1492 wrote on 12/22/2004, 4:36 PM

Thanks, goGiants....

Editing the audio track, setting audio FX, equalizer to 0 (default was 100%) made the audio work fine on rendered DVDs...