Music Album DVD Using DVDA

tygrus wrote on 8/9/2004, 10:22 PM
Just reading over at videohelp.com forum that supposedly, DVDA can be used to make very quick music albums. I have always know that you could put like 500 hundred or more songs on a dvd but avoided this process since seemed time consuming to prepare the audio and video assets.

According to the post on that forum, you just drag wave files to the menu screens and DVDA autoimatically puts a little video clip with it with the song title on it and will render the audio to AC3 2.0.

Can anyone confirm this is possible and any tips.
thx

Tygrus

Comments

stormstereo wrote on 8/10/2004, 12:54 AM
Well it's easy enough to make a music compilation since DVDA has a built in function to do so. Put an mp3 or wav in the list and it will be re-rendered when you finalize the project.

DVDA did not automatically add the name of the song or artist on the screen when I tried, just a black screen. This means you have to drag in a background and write in a name manually, or just write on the black background to speed it up a tiny bit.

Best/Tommy
bStro wrote on 8/10/2004, 8:52 AM
Well, they were sort of right.

DVD Architect has an option for a music compilation. You drag in your WAV or MP3 files (maybe other formats?) and DVDA creates a track (in CD lingo, not in editing lingo) for each one. DVDA adds a "title" to each one based on its filename. So, if the filename is DVDA Rocks!.WAV, then the title displayed will be DVDA Rocks!. It will not pull information from ID3 tags.

As far as I can tell, your titles will be in Arial by default, and changing the font requires going to each song one-by-one and selecting a new one. I don't know of a way to change several at one time (unlike, for example, the fonts for subtitles).

You can add an image or video to be displayed for each song, but DVDA does not insert one "automatically" -- after all, how would it know what to put there? If you don't add anything, the background will be black.

So, yeah, DVD Architect can make a music DVD quickly, but not if you want a particularly cutomized look. That's going to take a little more work.

Rob
FuTz wrote on 8/10/2004, 9:06 AM

... but, still, you can get something pretty much customized if you really want ... There's still turnarounds to get through but all in all, I think DVDA's a really good app.

Like bStro said: "That's going to take a little more work."

Oh, by the way, did you subscribe to "Vegas Tips, Tricks and Scripts" ? Good info there...

http://www.videoguys.com/Vegas_Tips/TTS02-06.pdf

johnmeyer wrote on 8/10/2004, 9:14 AM
The "Music Compilation" feature is one of the strangest features in DVDA. As already pointed out, if you want to create a music DVD that lets you play fifty hours of music on your DVD player, you are going to have to spend a long time typing titles since DVDA doesn't read MP3 tags, or connect to the CDDB/Gracenote database. This is a classic case of the development team not really thinking through how the market requirements (i.e., what a living, breathing semi-warm body might actually want to do).

The feature actually is far more useful for making standard video DVDs that are comprised of multiple MPEG files. This is EXTREMELY useful, and is something I kept yakking about before DVDA 2.0 came out. My point then -- and now -- is that it is always easier to create software, books, DVDs, or any creative effort in small pieces. You perfect each piece and then assemble the results. If you do this in Vegas, you end up rendering each portion of your project to a separate MPEG/AC3 combination. However, in DVDA1 (and DVDA2, if you use the standard menu-based compilation), you end up with a DVD that has each MPEG/AC3 in a separate titleset. Your DVD player will pause at each titleset, and the fast forward/reverse on your remote will not play through these titleset boundaries. However, in DVDA 2.x, if you put these MPEG/AC3 files into a Music Compilation, each compilation will be one titleset, and everything will play without hesitation (well, very little hesitation), and the forward/reverse will now work. The only limitation is that the audio must all be the same bitrate and same number of channels.