Post
by GeorgeC » November 27th, 2008, 5:05 pm
DVD transfers are another class in and of themselves, Ben!
(Forget about calling it technology. It's "voodoo art" and "magic" to me. Technology is supposed to work consistently every time but digital editing and authoring never seems to behave the same every time! There's always something...!)
I'm still learning...!
What I have learned about most cartoons is that there is little point in recording them higher than SP quality UNLESS there's a lot of fast-action in the shorts. Even then, I've only done this with one 45-minute anime which I have yet to do burn #2 with. I already had it on DVD-R but decided to do another authoring simply I was not happy with the way some animation sequences looked on the original DVD-R. Hence a new recording at HQ, and, so far, the only HQ recording I've bothered to keep.
Recording at SP quality (2-hour disc mode, single-layer) is enough. You're just burning through disc real estate at HQ (high quality, 1-hour) mode and experiencing no noticeable improvement in video quality. If you absolutely have to have HQ quality, I'd use it only for programs under an hour's length. Otherwise, stick to SP.
You could transfer more standard quality video to Blu-Ray but it won't improve the way the media looks on HDTV. At the same time, Blu-Ray recorders are still horrendously expensive ($1,000 MSRP at least and I still haven't seen them in stores!) and I haven't seen BD-R cheaper than $15 a-piece online in packs. Most stores still sell individual BD-R (25 GB, single-layer) for $25 a-piece. I'm sticking to DVD-R/DVD+R DL just for economy's sake and the knowledge that BD players can probably still upscale even homebrew DVD-R's if I want.
(Do they upscale 480i video? That's one question I'd like an answer to!)
Given the fact that you have to buy and install these burners through third parties in a PC does not inspire a lot of confidence in the BD-R format. I'll wait until Apple gets its act together and writes drivers for it. I think James is a Mac user, too, and has done some BD-R recording with mixed results. There's some question about how well even Sony BD players handle BD-Rs and whether or not the current authoring programs really handle BD-R well at all.
I have sliced up individual 30-minute episodes of a show on DVD but found out that in the end it's better to stick to SP mode (2-hour recording) than trying to squeeze more content onto disc even if it's only an extra 30 minutes. I recorded the 30-minute program(s) at SP+ (2.5 hour mode, single-layer) and just had all kinds of break-up onscreen during certain action sequences and the credits.
I haven't tried slicing up 7-minute shorts but I may do that in the future. So far, I've just copied toons as-is to DVD-R and only bothered to put start points for the sides of the LDs. I use MPEG Streamclip to edit and chop up clips (fastest and easiest program to use for MPEG that I've found) and after I get done with it (tried this with 30-minute episodes), I DIDN'T repeat any part of the videostream for the next clip. I went ahead and started the next edit from where I left off. (In other words, I through away the last segment I edited after I saved it as a separate file.) If you repeat segments of your MPEG streams, it can probably throw your player off.
They're say you're supposed to be able to join together MPEG clips from different sources or sections of the same movie but in practice I've found that it tends not to work well and makes the DVD player pause or crash. It seems better to leave the videostream intact or discretely edit the video files and NOT bother trying to join them together in an editing program like MPEG Streamclip. In other words, number and order them separately in your authoring program and you should be fine. That's how it seemed to work with the last DVD I authored. (Again, the problem with that DVD was the recording speed NOT the way I edited it.)
I'm limited to freeware and a sub-$100 DVD authoring program but short of taking another university class to use s $1,000 program I'm happy with thte results for the most part. I tried once to record straight to DVD+RW from laserdisc but have found the best results still come from recording to the DVD Recorder's hard-drive at SP speed before dumping to DVD+RW.
Even with an 80 GB hard-drive, I still get at least 34 hours of recording time at SP speed. Most newer DVD recorders with hard-drives mount 160 GB drives and get double that at SP speed. One thing I have noticed with DVD recorders is that they're AWFUL at editing video -- the remote just can't replace a good keyboard and mouse for editing(!) -- and their built-in editing capability is only useful for cutting out dead airtime at the beginning and end of the recordings.
With DVD playback on computers, your graphics card does matter as much as the CPU clockspeed. My computer is speedy enough even with an elderly 1.5 GHz processor but it made a big difference upgrading to a video card with 16 times the memory of my old card. The two DVD-Rs I had that acted up with playback (paused, then resumed playing on every machine they were played on) perform perfectly fine on my desktop after the video card upgrade.
