I have Pinnacle Studio 8 and I captured video from my Sony digital Hi 8 camcorder. When I burned a DVD with Studio 8, the playback on the DVD home player was not as clear as the tape source or as the computer capture.

Why is this? How can I capture from Hi 8 tape and preserve the same quality to DVD and have the same clarity on TV playback?

Do I need a better capture program ?

Thanks

John
NY.

You need a better Encoder - like TMPGEnc!

Studio 8 Uses an awefull Encoder,You need to use a Real Encoder to encode your Captured files to Mpeg2 for DVD if you want any sort of Quality...What Confuses me is why when you Get Bad Quality useing Stdio 8 you come here to ask Why???

In the menu editor I have set everything to motion menu.
I can set the seconds of the main menu animation here but can't find anywhere to set the length of each animated thumbnail.

In the help file it says...

"The chapter thumbnail will be animated for the specified number of seconds within the area of the thumbnail."

Where do i enter these seconds?

I've looked everywhere or does it use the main menu seconds?

Many Thanks

since the whole "background" INCLUDING the thumbnails is only ONE mpeg sequence, the loop-time for both is identical.
hence, you can only specify one time for the whole thing.

if you want - say - your thumbnails to loop every 2 seconds, and your background to loop every 4 seconds, you can make small mpeg-files for your thumbnails, that contain 2 runs of your 2 second loop.
that's just an example, but i hope you get the idea.

bye,
--hustbaer

Thanks for your reply.

The track menu itself is not aminated, just the thumbnails although the main menu background is animated and has no thumbnails.

Does this make a difference?

uh.
i see.
i misinterpreted your question.
sorry.

of course it would be technically possible to have different loop-lengths on every distinct page (just not within a page), but i dont think tmpgenc dvd author supports this.
adjust me if im wrong :)

so you should just set the loop-time to the duration of the main-menu-background-movie - that way your chapter-preview thunbs will loop the same length - but at least the background-loop will be the length you want it to be...

if you only have one animated thingy per page, everything will be fine, just that all loops will use the same duration.

bye,
--hustbaer

isn't that stupid: all menus must be the same length.... I'm leaving Tmpgenc.

I have 13 thumbnail chapters and want to create two Track Menus consisting of 7 and 6 but the menu editor only seems to give me 6 or 13 chapters to a page thus creating 3 or 1 track menu.

Is there a way round this so I can create two track menus without hiding any chapters?

Many Thanks

that means 1, 2, 3 etc. on the remote.

No idea.

Thanks

TMPGEnc DVD Author can't do that. Try DVDLab.

That's a bit of a throwback to VCD.

Are you sure you want a menu like this?

Number keys are for chapters rather than titles.

Is it possible to save a previously created menu ? The menus I will be using are similar, with only a few text changes between them. The "history" button does show the previous text but you still have to "cut and paste" each entry in the menu. I am trying to remove the error prone user(me) as much as possible from the creation process.

Thanks for your help

I exported an Adobe Premier 6.5 movie to their dv version of .avi. TMPGEnc would not work with that file, I imagine because it is DV I rather than DV II. Unfortunately, the Adobe export menu gives only one dv .avi file export choice, so I cannot easily select type II. Any suggestions?

Just convert it to DV 2.
http://www.canopus.com/US/products/DV_file_converter/pm_dv_file_converter.asp

Converter worked like a champ. Thx!!
Papafox

You can also use PlugIn-Pack to stream the Video directly from Premiere to any Encoder without saving the AVI first.

Is the TMPGEnc program able to take an AVI file from my DV camera and allow me to save it to a DVD disk that I can play on my home entertainment DVD player?

I'm not trying to do anything fancy here, just to save my edited .AVI file to some file format that will be: A: Very High Resolution, and B: Playable on my and my families home DVD players.

My first attempt with TMPGEnc took a 6GB 30 minute AVI file and after 7 HOURS of "converting" (on an XP3200+ system with 1 GB of PC3700 RAM, and a very fast 240GB RAID-0 array) gave me a nice 1.9GB file that had a ".M2V" extension. I burned that to a DVD disk and nothing seems to read this. What did I do wrong, and isn't there a simpler way to do this??

I've got 15 hours of home DV tapes I would like to put on DVD. Is TMPGEnc what I need, or are there better (simpler?) programs out there?

Thanks for your help.

P.S. - can I turn that .m2v file into something a DVD player will play?? (I've got a fancy new DVD player that will supposedly play EVERY format)

When encodeing DV AVI files with Tmpgenc make sure that the DV Files are Type-2 DV AVI files cuz Tmpgenc doesn"t like Type 1 DV..When you encode your DV Files to DVD in Tmpgenc there should be a M2V Video file and a Wav audio file, and you Don"t just Burn these files to DVD you have to use a DVD authoring Program to add chapters and menu"s and format the audio and Video files into a Video_TS Folder that then gets Burned to DVD in DVD-Video Mode..A simple DVD authoring Program to use is "Tmpgenc DVD author" which you can download by clicking the Banner below...and when you create the Mpeg2 file from the DV AVI files useing Tmpgenc you should go into the audio settings and change the audio format to Mpeg1 Layer 2 instead of LPCM because LPCM takes up Far too much Space on the DVD....Cheers

I have two movies in mpg format which I want to joing using TMPGenc merge tool. Both movies can be played in Windows Media Player perfectly fine, but when I want to join them, TMPGenc tells me that one of them doesn't have video stream. How is that possible when I can watch it with no problem. Thanks in advance

TMPGEnc is more sensitive to MPEG-Streams with Errors than Media Player.

Try to remux the Videos with ProjectX or bbTools first.

Is it possible to loop motion items - for example, having a background image + music item that loops, so that you can have ongoing music for as long as the menu page is up, or a video clip used to identify a chapter that keep looping round. At the moment, these things seem to run once, then end.

everything loops fine on my standalone-player.

did you use a hardware-player, or software?

bye,
--hustbaer

New to dvd burning so be gentle with your responses. Have a movie that was in avi format shrunk the file and converted to mpeg. Am i correct that you cannot burn a mpeg format and have play in stand alone dvd player? Do i need to reauthor this file using tmpgenc reauthor first? I tried to do that but kept receiving stream writing error.WHat can i do to get this mpeg file i have to playon my standalone dvd. This is themost frustrating thing i have ever tried to do. thankyou for your help

ok i know this has been answered before but no logical answer was found..so here goes

i have used tmpg for a while now....and have recently upgraded my system...but everytime i start tmpg....it comes up with

"CPU setting has been reset to default because cpu might be different fron last time,or new command has been supported"

any ideas

Just delete 'TMPGEnc.ini' and 'CurrentCfg.tpr' from the TMPG folder then run TMPG.

I see that you finally offer a plugin for AC-3, very good!

However, some things aint clear to me...
1. The periodical activation... Do i have to pay a new fee every activation?
2. The plugin WILL encode pcm .wav files I hope?
3. Is it 100% DolbyDigital licensed?

I guess the best way to get good AC3 sound would be to choose pcm sound in TMPGenc and then let DVD Author encode the .wav sound to AC3?

Question: 1. The periodical activation... Do i have to pay a new fee every activation?

Answer: I do not think so. From what I am guessing, they had to
go to great lengths to negotiate a license deal with Dolby Labs,
and that included occasional license verification. Personally
I do not know any other product that offers a certified Dolby
encoder for 29 dollars.


Question 2: The plugin WILL encode pcm .wav files I hope?

Answer: While the TMpgEnc folks are not very savy in the
documentation department, they do produce some excellent
products at an excellent price. While the docs seem indicate
that only MPEG audio will be reencoded, I just tried it,
and found that if you click the "reencode the audio using
the output format of the track" in the edit dialog box,
you can then click on the "settings" button in the track
list, and Dolby Digital will be listed in the audio encoding
options, and indeed, the file produced is encoded with the
parameters specified. I will also add that when I asked this
question directly to the TMPGEnc folks, they gave an incorrect
answer that it only used MPEG audio as a source, and that there
where no encoding options for the plugin. In short, yes, you
can use .wav, and yes, there are encoding options for setting
bitrates.


Question 3: Is it 100% DolbyDigital licensed?

Answer: The TMPGEnc folks are neither documentaion experts
nor are they marketing experts. This should be clearly
presented on the website. I have the feeling that they
are waiting for permission to use the Dolby logos on the
website. I asked this same question directly to the
TMPGEnc folks, and they answered that yes, it it is, and
yes, the product has passed Dolby Labs certification.
The plugin does sport the Dolby labs logos.

Hope that helps!

Joe

>I do not know any other product that offers a certified Dolby
>encoder for 29 dollars

The Premium between the 'base' and 'Disc Creator' versions of Ulead DVD MovieFactory 3 appears to be about $50.00 (About $50.00 verses $100.00). Since the difference between the two versions is both AC-3 support, and some other features, the $50.00 difference could probably be split between part for the AC-3 and part for the other features.

So, even though it's still a $50.00 difference it probably wouldn't be too far of a stretch to attribute the AC-3 part of that total to be something close to $30.00...

As far as I can tell from their ads, Ulead 'DVD MovieFactory 3 Disc Creator' doesn't require activation (but I haven't purchased it, so I don't know that for sure).

-Greg Bohn

Joe C. Hecht : Thanks alot for the clear answers, I might get this pugin now :)