The DVD Saga continues...
Saturday, March 24, 2007Ok, last Friday I finished a ‘good’ copy of The Interactive Stranger DVD. It was a long, hard project, but seemed to do well. I gave it to Lloyd to proof ‘watch’ for me. Well…he came back with some informaiton I didn’t want to hear - that the first couple words were being clipped when playing.
When I was building the video files, I was cutting things pretty close, thinking it wouldn’t be a problem. But it ended up being a problem. So this week, I’ve been adding 1 second of black video to the beginning and end of each clip (110 of them, remember?) That threw the closed captioning / subtitles off 1 second, so fixing that was in order. That’s 220 captioning files to work and export.
To implement the idea, it was better than expected. I didn’t have to delete much of the programming on the DVD disc, just all the video tracks from the Scenario Editor. Then you have to delete the tracks. Then you have to delete the video and audio clips. Once done, you can import the new clips, build your tracks (with Subtitles and Closed Captioning) then position them in the Scenario Editor, hooking the menu links back up.
I did all this, to come to find out that it now won’t fit on one DVD disc (adding 220 seconds to the clips made it too big.) Wasn’t much, about 12 mb, but there’s nothing to cut out. Sooo, after attempting to burn a DVD+R DL (Dual Layer), and succedding, but with much hassell, I decided it best to re-encode the audio to a smaller spec, saving about 57mb. I couldn’t squeeze the video anymore (there’s minimum standards for using VBR (Variable Bit Rate) and I was already as small as I could go, without jepardizing the quality significantly.
But - it worked just fine. It now fits on a single layer DVD and we are back to proofing it to make sure everything is right on.
Well, that’s about it for the week. A good learning experince, and one that I hope I never have to repeat!
