I am in the process of creating DVDs from 65 mini DV tapes, partly as alternative backup, but mainly to be able to view them easily.
I am trying to streamline the process as it is obviously going to take a long time to encode all those tapes. Firstly I ripped the tapes to raw DV avi's of about 13 GB each using Windows Movie Maker. I am putting two 1h tapes onto a DVD, with no editing and just a very basic menu and for this I found DVD Flick to be adequate. I also wanted to retain the DV date codes as subtitles on the DVD and managed to do that with a batch script that calls DV_DateCode and runs through all 65 avi files in succession. Each avi is in its own folder and the subtitle files are written into each folder. At first DVD Flick got stuck when trying to insert the subtitles. I ran DVD Flick on my i7 notebook connected via Gb ethernet to my file server (HP Proliant Microserver) containing the original ripped avi files. Everything seemed to go smoothly until the point where DVD Flick starts to insert the subtitles and then the window would go half blank and the project would never complete. Maybe someone could shed some light on this. When I ran DVD Flick directly on the file server instead, it managed to complete the project in about 4h.
The only problem that I still have is that the audio seems to be contained in two separate mono streams in the original avi file and DVD Flick encodes them as two audio tracks instead of a single stereo track. Did I rip the tapes wrong or is it supposed to be like that? How do I fix it? Should I be using some other tool than DVD Flick?
Could anyone recommend a better video tool that can perhaps the audio track problem and perhaps allow one to create better looking menus. While I'm at it I might as well set up my process properly and then crank the handle to encode all 65 tapes, instead of wishing at the end of it all that I had designed better menus :-)
DVD Flick seems to be abandonware right now - it's Forum has been down for a long time.
If the audio is in fact separate streams, then unless you delete one from the 'Edit Title..' menu, two streams is what you get in the final DVD.
I haven't been able to make it upmix a mono stream to stereo (there is a 'channel count' setting in Project Settings > Audio) - but since the mono stream comes through both speakers, I'm not clear on why I would change it - unless, in your case, the streams are different and were originally a single stereo stream.
AVStoDVD is supported and can make some nice menus.
This program allows does allow you to modify the Avisynth script that it uses, so you can upmix a mono stream to stereo.
Here's a screen capture of how the change is made.
the text is edited in the last two lines of the script.
Excellent thanks, I'll give it a shot. The two streams do sound different and Audacity confirms it when one looks at the waveform. Not sure why it wasn't save to the avi as a stereo stream in the first place.
Thanks for a very useful forum.
F
