weird dvd problem
 

Recently I’ve encountered a weird problem with my DVD studio pro. I burned my short film on a DVD for various screenings, and discovered that in the middle of the film one of the characters words were almost impossible to hear. Meanwhile, in DVD studio pro everything looked and sounded OK, as well as in original FCP project. The weird thing is that, sound drops only for a minute or so and then gets back to normal, and it happens to only one characters voice the rest of the soundtrack is fine…
Did anybody encounter a similar problem before?
thanks
vic

Victor,

what type of audio track do you have for your feature (how many channels, PCM, 5.1, etc.)? If you play the DVD image on your Mac with Apple's DVD Player software (by opening the VIDEO_TS folder that DVD Studio Pro generates), do you observe the same problem?

When you say "in DVD studio pro everything looked and sounded OK", are you referring to the "Simulate" feature in DVD Studio Pro?

- Martin

Martin
I have several audio tracks in DVD pro. Left for one actor, and right for second one (that is audio tracks 1 and 2) Tracks 3 and 4 are for sound effects such wind and etc. Finally, tracks 5 and 6 for the music. In FCP sound was wav. In DVD pro it is AIFF.
After my DVD played with the previously mentioned problems on my home DVD player, I played it on my MAC and there were no problems then. I also went to my next-door neighbor and played the DVD there. Same problems occurred there.
When I say "in DVD studio pro everything looked and sounded OK," I mean both simulator and the track under the viewer.
Thanks for the reply
Vic
P.S. I went to the local Apple store and they were surprised at my problem as well; it seems like a really weird problem I'm encountering.

Martin,
I also tried to export the film from FCP using Quick Time Conversion instead of Compressor, and although the quality was not the same, strangely problems were identical...

Victor,

my apologies, I used the wrong word to ask the question I meant to ask. Instead of "tracks", I really meant "audio streams" (assets) that you have in your track inside DVD Studio Pro. What you have written so far makes me assume that you have a single audio stream which was generated by Final Cut Pro. I further assume that your six audio tracks within FCP were down-mixed to a stereo AIFF when you exported the audio from FCP. Please advise if I misunderstood anything up to this point.

I don't have a clear idea of what might be going on, but two things that I'd look into are:

(1) Make sure your stereo AIFF plays back correctly in mono. You can do that easily by loading it into Soundtrack Pro and holding down the "Mono Mix Button" while you listen. If one channel cancels out the other channel, you'll notice that this way.

(2) How are your first and second channel panned (left, center, right)? You wrote "Left for one actor, and right for second one"; is this really how you are panning your dialog tracks for the final mix? You also mentioned that "one of the characters words were almost impossible to hear", so it sounds like only one of your channels is affected. Does your dialog panning change at all during the feature, or do you use a constant setting? I am just looking for things that may affect a single channel...

A sidenote, and this is not really related to your problem, you may want to encode your audio as AC3 (Dolby Digital) as opposed to AIFF for the DVD. It uses much less disk space, and therefore leaves valuable space and bandwidth for your video. Who knows, maybe by doing this you could even work around the original problem (even though this sounds like an interesting one, and I am very curious what the final outcome will be...).

- Martin

OK, here is the solution to my problem (that I finally found out after going to the Apple store in soho and talking to the pro-care specialist.)
The solution is to open up the original audio clip in the viewer by doble clicking it, go to Audio(or Stereo) and slide PAN level to the middle, instead of keeping it to the left or right as it was before I corrected the problem.