Only reason you might want to render to AVI before going to DVDA is if you think you might want to edit the rendered AVI, or use it as a source file someday for other projects.

Of course, saving big ol' AVI files for such purposes takes lots of space, and as discussed in other topics it makes sense to store stuff using Print to Tape if disk space is an issue.

And in comparison, one reason to go to MPEG first is if you build a DVDA project and then decide for some reason to change the menu, you must re-encode the entire thing.

What about the audio? I too am a newbie, and have had the following problem. I have used VMS 4.0 to make a movie in MPEG-2 format. The audio track is all music that I have ripped from CDs that I own. I then use DVDA to add the menu and burn the DVD. When I preview the DVD in DVDA, the video looks great and the audio sounds perfect. When I use DVDA to burn the DVD, it tells me it is compressing the audio. When I play the resulting DVD, the video is perfect but the audio is terribly distorted. I have examined the wav files of the individual songs, and they are fine on the PC. And it seems that the rendered output of VMS is fine also, since I can preview it in DVDA just fine. It seems that something is going wrong when DVDA compresses my audio.

Does anyone know what might cause this, and how I might fix it?

What format is the audio in? Try rendering the audio from VMS as a seperate WAV file at 48khz and then feed the WAV file to DVDAS - it shouldn't need to recompress this.

Another thought on the audio part of dsg1963's question:

Do you get the audio distortion when you play on a standalone DVD player with TV/stereo speakers? Does the audio play fine on your PC when playing the completed DVD? (As opposed to in the preview you mentioned.)

I've had significant chunks of my audio wind up sounding lousy when played on my TV because my speakers were overloaded by the volume level of parts of the audio clip. It's possible that somehow when you ripped from your CDs the audio level was too high, or at least too high for when you play your DVD. Just a thought...

ScottW and gogiants, thank you for your suggestions. I also wondered if the distortion was due to loudness, but I think the individual wave files are at a pretty reasonable loudness level, and some of the distortions are in songs that are not loud at all. I haven't played the DVD on my PC, so I will try that.

I did not realize I could render the audio separately from the video to a wave file. I did that last night, and will burn a new DVD today. Hopefully that will fix my problem. This leads me to another question: if you render the video only in VMS, what happens to the audio? How does DVDA know where to get the audio from if it is not rendered explicitly? And what exactly does DVDA do when it compresses the audio?

I'll post the results of my latest attempt. Thanks again for your help!

I can't be specific about DVDAS since I use DVDA (the big brother), but with DVDA if the WAV file has the same name as the video file and it is in the same directory, it will automatically be included - if not you should be able to specify the specific audio file on the movie object properties.

Well, I tried rendering the audio to a separate wave file: same results. Then I tried lowering the volume on the audio clips, since it was uneven anyway: same results.

I just don't know what to try next. When I play the DVD on my PC, the audio is perfect, so could it be my DVD player? We use it all the time for DVDs that have a lot more dynamic range than this DVD, so what could be the problem with the player?

The Sony tech support people say to try a different brand or type of DVD (I use DVD+R), because sometimes players react differently to different types or brands. But I've made many DVDs that all play in this player without a problem.

Any suggestions? I'm completely frustrated.

This won't be a direct answer, but here are some thoughts on how to narrow down the problem:

1) Use DVD Architect Studio to prepare, but NOT burn your DVD. Then use another program to do the burn. Most burners come with software that will burn prepared files, or you might try the freebie combo of DVD Shrink (to create a .iso file from your prepared folder) and DVD Decrypter (to burn the .iso file.)

If this works, then you'll know it's a problem with how DVD AS is burning your DVDs.

2) Use DVD Arch Studio to create a short MPEG-2 file that contains a "bad" audio segment. Then use another DVD authoring program to create a DVD. If this works, then you know it has something to do with DVD AS converting/compressing the files.

Just some thoughts... if you're still in hte mood to diagnose, that is.

- Bill

Bill,

Those are good suggestions, but I have a question. Since I am able to play the DVD on my PC with perfect audio, doesn't that eliminate DVDAS as the culprit? I guess that's what I'm stuck on. Even the DVD I burned before I lowered the volume on the audio played just fine on my PC. To me this means the DVD must be fine. Is that an incorrect conclusion?

Don

I too am new to this software and digital video in general. But, after reading the posts here I came to a conclusion that may help. Try the DVD you created on a neighbor's stand alone dvd player setup to pinpoint whether it's a speaker problem or not. Just a thought.

Ok, I found out how to NOT have this problem, but I am still not sure what caused it.

Taking Bill's advice, I did some experimenting. I burned one of the songs that was getting distorted into a DVD by itself, un-normalized and with full volume. It played perfectly in the DVD player. Victory! Then I burned a small piece of video along with another corrupted song into another DVD, and had the same success.

At this point I have to conclude that something else I was doing in creating the movie was somehow corrupting the audio in the process. I was trying something a little differently this time from previous DVDs, and maybe that caused the problem. Previously, I had created individual movies in VMS, and "linked" them into the final DVD menu in DVDAS. But this time, I created one movie which actually consisted of 4 smaller movies. I left some frames blank between them on the timeline. I didn't think this was a problem, since when I previewed the movie, the blank spaces were just black, which is what I wanted. Then, in DVDAS, I created menu buttons for each section of the movie. Also, in several of the cases, I did not start the audio track at the same time as the video track; lagged behind it maybe a second or a half-second. This was to deliberatey start the audio later than the video. I guess one of these things was a dumb thing to do (or maybe both). Now I am starting the audio at the same point as the video, and creating smaller individual movies again, and so far so good.

Hopefully this doesn't make me a total idiot; I'm still not sure why these things caused a problem. But in the process of working through it, I've learned more about using VMS than I ever could from a manual, mostly from you folks. Thanks to everyone who made a suggestion to help me; you really did!

Don