Thursday, June 21, 2007

Solution to DVD's made with DVD Studio Pro / iDVD that stick or hang

I recently was working on a highlight tape for Girls basketball team, (you can view a very, very, early sample if you wish). Anyways, during the course of this project I had several sequences. The strategy when making the dvd was one sequence per DVD track. I’m not going to get too technical, mostly b/c I’m not 100% sure I’d use the correct terms, this was my first project in the land of video editing.

In the course of editing all of the game tapes into clips and those clips into sequences there were many revisions of sequences. Thus frequent sending the sequences to DVD Studio Pro and then burning the DVD so that the coach could review each different version. Because the content of the sequences changed, i.e. clips were added, dropped, re-organized with the timeline of the sequence, each edit required a re-rendering of the sequence into the DVD format (mpeg-2) so that the track could placed on the DVD. This led to the same track being added and replaced with the latest version in the DVD Studio project. I kept the name of the Tracks the through out the entire project. (to keep each revision organized, I ended up encoding to a directory called v1 for version 1 and v2 for version 2, so I know a file with the name “regular_season_track_1.mpg” in folder v1 was version 1 and same file in a folder v2 was version 2)

In addition to editing the video sequences, I also was using some of the DVD Studio features to program the menu buttons and the transistions between tracks the “jump to” targets at the end of each track, etc. Over time I also changed the order in some of the tracks.

Over time, this was when the problem started to arise and that was the DVD’s that I was burning would get stuck in normal dvd players i.e. they would no longer play through all the tracks, or they would jump to really, really odd things, that I could not explain based what I *thought* I had done.

In the course of trying to troubleshoot this, I basically started clicking around all parts of DVD Studio Pro. When you have a DVD Studio project, DVD Studio Pro, has a view of the Tracks, menu’s slideshow’s etc, in the “Outline Tab.” There is also button that will toggle between the “Type” view and the “VTS” view. I noticed when I reviewed the VTS view of my DVD project, that there VTS folders roughly named in similarly to each track that I wanted. For example VTS 1, VTS 2, VTS 3, etc. When I opened up these VTS folders, that was when I noticed the actual mpeg-2 track in these folder were out of sync with VTS folder name. That is track_1 was in a folder name VTS_3, instead of track_1 being contained in VTS 1.

I manually then moved the tracks around such that the track names were in sync with the VTS Folder names. After burning a DVD with these corrections made it played just fine in all DVD players.

I realize this may not be the correct technical terminology, but if there are any other first timers out there like me hacking their way through video editing, and they have made a DVD that hangs when you try to play it, it can be quite frustrating searching for help on web. I hope this tip solves the issue for you, or at least gives one other thing to troubleshoot, or a nudge in the right direction.

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