Prepare disc gets stuck on 'Preparing compilation' - advice?

Leatherhead wrote on 3/15/2022, 12:37 AM

Hello everyone.

I have a simple Bluray project with just 1 menu and 3 sub menus.

Just one problem, when I go to Prepare disc, it wizzes through and gets to 67% in only 45 seconds. And then it gets held up on "Preparing compilation for 00003.m2ts" and takes 50 minutes to prepare for a 30-minute movie. Mind you, it's not rendering, it appears to be structuring the file.

  • All video files are prerendered in MPEG-2 matched with the framerate, bitrate, and container type in the disc project settings
  • In optimize disc, the only alerts are that the audio for the video files will need to be recompressed. This happens in merely seconds. The other alerts are related to the menu media but those are just still images so I don't think those are holding it up
  • I have a very powerful computer - 8-core Ryzen with 32GB of RAM running on an ultrafast M2 card

Any tips on how to speed up the preparing compilation process? I would like to test a few versions of the movie to make sure everything is working good as I build out the menus but this is an excruciatingly slow process.

Comments

EricLNZ wrote on 3/15/2022, 2:44 AM

DVDA is a 32 bit application and a few years old so won't be making full use of your very powerful computer.

00003.mts is probably your second video file or maybe your first if you have two menus before you get to it. It would appear DVDA is struggling with it. How many video files does your project contain?

Is there a reason you are using mpeg-2 (designed in SD days) and not AVC? Also what bitrate are the files, and if VBR what is the top bitrate?

Leatherhead wrote on 3/15/2022, 7:42 AM

Hi EricLNZ,

I'm using MPEG-2 because of a different DVDA issue. (Adobe Premiere doesn't support output to AC3 audio and DVDA is struggling to handle this with my AVC files. With MPEG-2, it works perfectly and recompresses the audio in seconds).

All files are CBR 24Mbits.

I will take another whack at using AVC files and see if that makes a difference here.

EricLNZ wrote on 3/15/2022, 9:34 PM

@Leatherhead Your bitrate shouldn't be a problem and AVC probably won't solve it.

With your AVC and mpeg-2 files what format is the audio?

As you are probably aware DVDA is very customisable. It's easy to change the audio steam to be used. For example if Premiere allows you export just the audio to a separate wav file, you can tell DVDA to use that instead of the audio stream in the video file. You could then recompress this wav to AC3 if that's what you prefer on your disc.

DMT3 wrote on 3/16/2022, 12:28 AM

Are you loading separate streams into DVDA? In other words, an audio file and a separate video file? It might be having trouble demuxing the file which it has to do.