New to This -- Help Please (Nero)

[VideoPhish]

Newbie here...

Not new to editing... been using Adobe Premiere for over a year. Problem is, I'm using it on an older Mac with no DVD burning capabilities...

I recently bought a new PC. I got the Plextor 708A DVD Burner which came with Roxio CD DVD Creator. Well I heard bad things about it, and ran into instability issues right out of the box, so I started looking for another option.

A friend of my husbands said to check out Nero. So I bought it the Ultimate Nero pack... and I've run into a few glitches (and needless to say, I think they have one of the WORST websites on the planet, along with terrible support).

Here's what I'm running into:

Problem #1: The aspect ratio in my menu is 4:3, even though I'm using a 16:9 setting... on the finished DVD all my video plays full screen on a 16:9 TV, but the menu shows up in letterbox.

Problem #2: Video quality seems "off"... it seems that quality was lost either during encoding, or during capture. I can't tell which. I have all the settings set to the highest possible.

Problem #3 (and the most disturbing): When I try to do animated menus I get digital noise -- by noise, I mean large multicolor pixels -- kind like when you have a bad DV tape. The captured videos are all fine, and it only happens the minute I turn animated buttons on. If I use a video background with animated buttons, I get noise in both the background and the buttons. If I use an image background with animated buttons, I get noise only in the animated buttons. If neither is moving it looks ok (but the quality is poor - jaggy fonts, unsmooth edges).
This noise occurs both when I preview on the computer and when I burn to DVD (any format).

Anyone have an ideas or experienced similar?

Also, what other DVD authoring software would you recommend... something in a similar price range ($100-$200)...

Thanks all...

Amy

[windtrader]

welcome to the forum.

Nero is a primarily a CD/DVD buring tool, not much else. Most of the questions you post are related to encoding and authoring. If the Nero bundle has software that you used that gave you these problems, you may want to look elsewhere.

Nero is a great product although as you mention, their website sucks and provides very little support. Use this just to burn the DVD-Video discs. Use the DVD-Video option, take the defaults, drag in the IFO and VOBS into the VIDEO_TS directory and burn. It works.

As to authoring on the PC, there are a number of products that are quite good. DVD Author by Tmpgenc is very straightforward, solid, and capable of producing simple menus and movies. DVD-Lab is more sophisticated and does more with motion menus and editing.

Most of the consumer authoring tools have some editing capability built in as opposed to a pro authoring tool.

Sonic and Ulead produces a full line of solid tools. There are many other point solutions to do various aspects of the capture, encoding, editing, and authoring. Doom9 and here are great sites. I'd start reading the guides and FAQs.

Good luck.

[VideoPhish]

Windtrader,

Nero Ultimate comes with a whole sweet of tools, one of them being Nero Vision Express, which does encoding and DVD authoring.

I was looking at DVD Lab just a little while ago -- it looks like a decent program, and will maybe offer me more flexibility in how things look.

But what do I use for encoding and capturing? It could get expensive if I have to buy a separate program to do each component of what all the Nero components do as a bundle.

I'm still interested to hear if anyone has had similar problems and any possible ideas how to fix

Amy

[windtrader]

Most tools have trials so you can experiment with a few to see what they do and how they compare.

Since you already use Premiere, why wouldn't you look at Encore. The tools are certainly not cheap but the learning curve would be quite low. Isn't there a good discount if you are upgrading from your version to the PC version?

[Quality's Proof]

VideoPhish,

Hi Amy,

Windtrader gave you some good advice and his last past could help you save some money with a software upgrade instead of a different software purchase.

But, would you tell us actually what you are doing?

Many people are nowadays (now that standalone dvd recorders are @ $300.00 and even as low as $250.00 @ Wal-Mart) are doing a 1 : 1 transfer from their video source (camera, etc.) to a standalone dvd recorder, then from the standalone to the hdd via the recorded disc, no audio synch, problems, etc..

It is "more or less" the same as a v.c.r. to v.c.r transfer.......it has gotten that simple.

I have one of the better capture cards and have never been satisfied with that kind of capture quality.

The price of standalone recorders will continue to fall, so a wait of a few months could find a better quality standalone for $400.00., then all you would need would be some freeware software or use what you already have for the making of chapters, menus, etc..