As to why you had problems, Steve, there have been a few similar threads. AFAIK no one's come up with a cure, and my impression is that most people having this sort of problem are more-or-less waiting for a new version of DVDA to see if it's fixed. Myself, I've had similar problems with other software, and believe it has more to do with the methods that some software uses along with certain drivers installed for burning and Windows.

That said, there are 2 philosophies: 1 tends to use specialty software -- the other doesn't. I've personally never used any Sony software to burn a disc -- I fail to see any advantage to it, and in fact with DVDs, several disadvantages... You can't test a disc until you've burned it, you can't modify a DVD layout, it's a pain when you decide later to burn another copy, and other programs are designed purely to burn discs -- that's what they do -- IMHO doing a better job of it.

That doesn't mean however that you should use Nero to burn DL blanks -- I think ImgBurn is almost universally preferred -- you can read about this is other forums. While the manufacturer of the DL blanks you use is very important [the actual manufacturer rather than brand], it's usually only important re: players rather than burners.

As far as hints... The faster a drive burns discs, the less accurate they're going to be, so for max DL player compatibility many folks stick to 2.5 X. Some players (usually older ones) don't recognize the ID code for +R SL & DL, so again for max compatibility, a program like ImgBurn can have the drive burn the ID for DVD-ROM.

Creating the split for the layer break is something that can take a slight bit of extra work if you're so inclined.... Ideally it'll be at the physical 1/2 way point of all the data on the disc -- the closer the better. If you've got smaller titles that will fit on one side, rearranging their order to that the 2nd layer starts with a fresh title set is really ideal. Otherwise the middle of scenes without a lot of motion, or the middle of a fade to/from black, either at a relatively quiet spot in the audio works very well.

If you read up on it you'll see mention of things like VOB ID that you can do little about (easily anyway) authoring with DVDA. You'll also see that a layer break [LB] can only happen at a new cell. In DVDA you create cells by setting chapter points. It's very easy to create a chapter point for the LB, and then remove the chapter assigned to that cell, giving you better artistic control... I've detailed it in another thread if you want to search, but in a nutshell you create the LB chapter last, after any scene menus, render to hdd, then use PgcEdit to shift the chapter numbers so that the LB cell occurs in the middle of a chapter.

There's a lot of info written about creating a DL image or burning a disc with PgcEdit and ImgBurn so I won't bore you with that. I would suggest reading the discussion on setting the cell flag as seamless, & deciding if you want to try it.

"As far as hints... The faster a drive burns discs, the less accurate they're going to be, so for max DL player compatibility many folks stick to 2.5 X."

Not to be argumentative, but as far as I know, there's no evidence to support this any longer, though it may have been true when recordable media first came out.

In fact there are so many variables that affect the overal quality of a burn, you cannot just simply say "burn slower for better results" - the burner, the firmware, the speed, type type of dye, the quality of the media (most important IMO) all contribute.

Further, my empirical observations after burning literaly thousands of disks over the last 3 years is that media quality is far more important than most other factors, and slow burning may be the worst thing you can do.

For a detailed discussion of things that impact burn quality, surf over to:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/

The advanced concepts section has some good discussion about burn speeds (and how things like 4x, 8x and 16x are really non-sensical terms).

--Scott

Hi Scott

You may be right about burning speed, or at least with your set-up. Myself, due to an acquired gene I [unwillingly] inherited from my folks, what with their experiences during the Depression, I'm an incurably cheap Bast***... To me discs are like dinnerware -- there's the good stuff & then there's the incomplete set for everyday. When it counts I use Verbatim -- otherwise I get away using the cheaper stuff from Best Buy or Office Max or whomever's running a good sale.

With that as a test bed, and in agreement with your saying manufacturer is most important, I have found a very real difference with burn speed directly effecting SL compatibility. On a cheap, older player I like to use for lowest common denominator testing, I have problems with premium DLs burned at greater than 2.5X -- not on newer cheap or expensive players. That's with top rated LG, NEC, & an external TDK burners.

Anyway, not posting to say you're wrong or anything -- just personal experience.

Agreed with ScottW that we get caught into "old habits", and so stick with rules such as "don't burn faster than "x" speed..."

As technology advances (software and hardware and media), we can short-change ourselves by burning at slower than rated speeds. This past season, a friend of mine burned everything at max speeds using off-the-shelf stuff from TDK, Memorex, and Sony. He produced hockey-game dvd's for hios team, and distributed each game (about 20 of them) to the coaches and parents (good distribution). Not one ever had an issue with his burned discs -- so that's a good indication that burn speed might be overrated -- I did have him keep the bitrate at ~6mbps and AC3 audio. Maybe if he used the max allowed bitrates, his results might have been different.

I still burn at 4x for distribution, but luckily my final DVD's have been ~2.5 - 3gb max. So it doesn't take as long to burn. But I might change that thinking if I ever needed to burn full 4gb and large amount of discs.

slightly OT -- for those wanting to experiment with +DL media -- Bestbuy has a sale for Dynex brand 15 +DL discs in jewel cases for $16.99. I don't know anything about the media codes and quality of those discs, but if they go bad, at least you can still use the Jewel cases...

Thanks for the replies everyone. Lots of good things to keep in mind there. I certainly don't have an absolute need to use DVDA for my burning, but you know you spend money on it and you expect it to do it's job. I'm familiar with Nero and have used it for years with great success but I'm going to take a look at the other tools that you guy's suggested. Always looking for something new to poke around with and help improve my workflow.

I'm kind of cheap with my media, depending on what I'm doing as well. For most of my test burns, I just use the cheap stuff so if something goes wrong I'm not out a lot of $$$. I figure if the burn works on that, it'll work on my good media that I'll use for the final distribution.

I did have a decent position setup for the layer transition, so I don't think that should have been a problem for DVDA, but you never can tell.

I've got to re-render the whole project again (forgot to crop the most important "here comes the bride" scene to get rid of some black bars on the sides. My wife wouldn't be happy if that was the only one that I missed!). Another 12 hours waiting for this will give me time to try out some of the suggested tools.

--Steve

"'Ive got to re-render the whole project again (forgot to crop the most important "here comes the bride" scene to get rid of some black bars on the sides."

While visible on PCs, perhaps not visible on TV because of overscan FWIW. Personally I recommend VirtualDub or Avisynth for cleaner/faster resizes, though if intended for TV I usually leave the over-scan there -- unless you do a width-only stretch to compensate for the crop, enlarging interlaced can be iffy.

"Another 12 hours waiting..."

*IF* it helps in the future... FWIW & all...
There are programs to cut edit mpg2 -- some work on I frames, others on any frame -- and some are freeware. In this sort of situation you might re-render your cropped video, cut your existing vid into before and after clips, then reassemble. No re-encoding is done, and the time it takes is however long it takes to copy the video files from one place to another.

"Agreed with ScottW that we get caught into "old habits", "
Not to belabor the point, can't test everywhere, so if there's a chance it might help, what the *L*? I've always got something to do rather than watch the screen during burning -- that's why Nero plays an audio file to announce it's done.

"... friend of mine burned everything at max speeds ... Not one ever had an issue with his burned discs..."

When I stop hearing about it as a potential issue at sites like CDFreaks, videohelp, doom8.org etc. for a good long time and it plays well everywhere I'll probably jump from 8 - 12 to 16 or better. Advice I've followed for years in a nutshell says to have some really cheap equipment on hand for testing along with your decent gear. If it works well on both, you've hopefully bracketed your audience.

"...might change that thinking if I ever needed to burn full 4gb and large amount of discs."

When/if you do a lot of replication, it's more cost effective [not to mention more energy efficient thinking green] to buy or put together a separate duplicator, if only using pieces left over after upgrade

I recently picked up VitualDub and have started playing around with it. So far mostly just for the getting the 24p out of my video files. I'll have to check it out more for all of it's other features. I'm pretty green at a lot of this and there is so much to learn.

Most of my 12 hours rendering is mostly because right now I'm doing all of this on just 1 hard drive. It's getting pretty busy. Next month I'll be adding another drive to render to and hopefully another after that as the source drive. My avg disk queue length seems to be the major bottle neck at this point.

So far mostly just for the getting the 24p out of my video files.

Are these movies recorded off the air? If so, then this will sort of work, but there are MUCH better ways to do IVTC (inverse telecine). If it is regular video, then changing to 24p will do nothing but screw things up.

No, not off the air. I've got the Canon HV20, which has true 24p. I've been just doing some testing around with it to see how well I like it, and the workflow to get the true 24p out after capturing in Vegas.

What I've been doing to get the 24p out:
1. Capture in Vegas, standard 60i.
2. Render the video out as AVI 60i
3. Use virtual dub to remove the pull down.
4. Save as 24p AVI (uncompressed).
5. Open a new 24p project in Vegas and load the 24p AVI and re-render into a format which doesn't occupy as much space.

steve

FWIW I'd check in the Vegas forum as well as other, more camera oriented forums -- seems like a lot of extra work if the camera does 24p. Personally I'd also see about avoiding uncompressed & going for one of the lossless or near lossless yuv codecs to try and take advantage of any quality edge -- you can often lose more through the color conversions & such than through the re-compression.