Please Help!

TeFLoN wrote on 6/12/2003, 7:48 PM
I created a DVD with motion background/motion thumbnails on main menu page and solid background and motion thumbnails on the sub pages(chapter selection pages). I included 1 minute looped AC3 background music on every page. I told it to animate the thumbnail and loop it on every chapter selection (18 of them). Here is the crux of the problem:
When I tell it to "animate the thumbnail" and point it to some point on my main movie and loop that every 1 minute, does it render the entire video for each and every thumbnail?
The reason I ask is because it is taking a LIFETIME (6+ hours) to render the video and the part that is taking the longest the chapter selection pages. I rendered the original video in Vegas and used the MPEG2 template. No recompression was necessary on the main video according to DVDA. It said recompression was necessary for the chapter selection menu pages, but I'm not sure why. All audio is AC3.
If I "preselect" chapter points in Vegas and create small little MPEG's and tell DVDA to play those for my thumbnails, will it decrease the render time significantly?

Thanks
TeF

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 6/12/2003, 9:32 PM
My experience is this...

If I animate thumbnails I check BOTH auto caculate length and loop. This causes the thumbnail to animate for exactly the length of the background music for that page. I use only seperately rendered (in Vegas) short audio file for whatever the duration I want typically 30-50 seconds with a few seconds silence at the end. So in effect each thumbnail can/will animated a different length and loop.

Now does DVD-A render a seperate file for the looped video played as the thumbnail on top of rendering the whole video? Apparently not, because I run very tight usually getting between 4.5 - 4.6 GB per disc.

Why yours takes so long I haven 't a clue. The first few projects I watched the progress bars like a hawk just to see what was happening. DVD-A built the image files quickly and only rerendered the audio files because I dropped in only one file for each vid, a MPEG-2 that has both video and audio, which causes DVD-A to rerender the audio only but leaves the video alone.

If or not it leaves it alone depends on how big your project is. Again, you have to watch as you build it. The counter gets bumped and seems fairly accurate. Did you enter chapter points in Vegas or did you add the chapter points in DVD-A? I alway do it in DVD-A. That said the whole process, excluding the making and setting up the design and aligment of titles, text and thumbnails takes a little under a hour and aother 40-50 minutes for the image file building, plus another 30 minutes or so to actually burn the disc.

So that's the long way of saying no... it shouldn't take six hours. It seems DVD-A is recompressing your videos.
TeFLoN wrote on 6/12/2003, 9:54 PM
You do exactly what I do. I made the audio in Vegas (1 min long) and looped it with auto calc in DVDA. I understand from what you typed that when you "animate" a thumbnail, you are simply pointing it to the already rendered MPEG 2 stream that you dropped into DVDA. I do the same. Given that, I'm confused. It takes FOREVER to render those chapter selection pages with 6 animated thumbnails for the different chapter points. I made the chapters in DVDA. I'll mess with it a bit and see if I'm doing something funky.

TeF
BillyBoy wrote on 6/13/2003, 9:50 AM
I thought you were, just wanted to spell it out to be sure. Have you checked under the optimize tab before actually doing the final steps to see what DVD-A is planning on recompressing? I only see its set to redo the audio from the MPEG-2's... nothing else. The only reason I can think of why it is taking so long is one or more of your videos is getting recompressed video streams too, because you're trying to get too much on the disc. What speed burner you using?