LPCM or Dolby Digital Audio?

dblml320 · Post by **dblml320** » Tue Apr 19, 2005 11:20 pm

Hello I am using VS9 and DVD Movie Factory 4 for a project. I am wondering which audio setting in the clips I should use... LPCM or Dolby Digital Audio?

I am looking for the best setting to support a wide range of standard DVD players.

Masami · Post by **Masami** » Tue Apr 19, 2005 11:30 pm

Dolby Digital is higher quality at a lower size, but LPCM wins out for most universal format. It's the original DVD audio format, so all DVD players can play it.

jchunter · Post by **jchunter** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 1:32 am

Jav,
I have been pleasantly surprised at how well the Dolby encoding works in VS9. I have captured video direct to Mpeg2 with Dolby with no strain or pain or dropped frames. Dolby files are much smaller than LCPM.
John

thecoalman · Post by **thecoalman** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 2:05 am

Masami wrote:Dolby Digital is higher quality at a lower size, but LPCM wins out for most universal format. It's the original DVD audio format, so all DVD players can play it.

There's very few DVD players that don't support Dolby. If you have one that doesn't I'd suggest contacting the Smithsonian.

dblml320 · Post by **dblml320** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 10:48 am

jchunter wrote:Jav,
I have been pleasantly surprised at how well the Dolby encoding works in VS9. I have captured video direct to Mpeg2 with Dolby with no strain or pain or dropped frames. Dolby files are much smaller than LCPM.
John

Hi John .. First, thanks very much for all of the replies in this thread, they all have been helpful!

Second. I notices when setting up project settings in VS9, there is no selection for Dolby Digital audio, just LPCM or Mpeg audio. If the final target audio is to be Dolby Digitial, is one of these better than the other?

I have an additional reason for asking this question. I move my video to DVD Movie Factory to actually make the DVD. I burned a test DVD yesterday and found an interesting problem... The audio I included with the menus was not in Dolby Digital, but when I played a chapter of the DVD, the audio switched into dolby digital (I could see my receiver indicate the different audio stream), and the volume was much lower.

I also, in that burn, had the volume normalization setting set, but there was no normalized volume. Perhaps this is a bug in DVD Movie Factory 4?

Any thoughts?

jchunter · Post by **jchunter** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 1:50 pm

Jav
Yes, VS9 has a bug that doesn't permit setting project properties to Dolby sound. However, you can leave them set to Mpeg sound while you edit, etc. Then when creating the project video file, select "Custom" and you can enable Dolby audio. Since I captured directly to Dolby, creating the video file went quickly. When Burning DVD, you can (and should) also select Dolby in the Burn properties.

I can't comment on DVDMF because I have not used it in some time.
John

Trevor Andrew · Post by **Trevor Andrew** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 3:35 pm

Hi John

Are you saying you captured to Digital Dolby.
I am still using VS 8 and cannot capture to AC3.
I captured to Pal Dvd template and LPCM, no editing required but had to render in order to get the AC 3 audio onto my video.
I then burned successfully.

I have just tried another create disc and VS 8 tells me that it does NOT support Digital Dolby.
Yes I have the plugin, it say’s so in the all about video studio ?

Can you believe it!!!!!!!!!!!!

By the way the file sizes reduce dramatically when using AC 3 Digital Dolby instead of Lpcm
In my case:-

850 Mb to 640 Mb

All the Best

jchunter · Post by **jchunter** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 7:43 pm

Trevor,
Yes, I captured about 12 min. of video with VS9 direct to Mpeg2 with Dolby audio because Dolby is supported right out of the box. (I never tried with VS8 - no plugin.)

Go ahead and order the boxed version. On balance, it works better than 8. No OOS problems with newly captured video - yet...
John

THoff · Post by **THoff** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 8:19 pm

That's a surprising but welcome development.

I simply assumed that the AC-3 support in UVS 9 had no additional functionality beyond what was in the UVS 8 + AC3 Plugin combo, but if you can actually capture directly to AC-3 audio, they added a really nice little feature. People with sufficiently equipped PCs will be able to capture directly to their final DVD output format and skip the transcoding altogether if they want.

jchunter · Post by **jchunter** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 9:42 pm

Torsten,
That is exactly what I did. No format recoding was necessary. Minor rendering happened when I created the video file only because I stuck in some jpegs, transitions, and titles, which happened about 2X real time.

But I could have taken the captured video file and Selected it in the Share/Create Disk module and it would have a good chance to burn. Wait, I'll try it now.
John

jchunter · Post by **jchunter** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 9:58 pm

Done!

I selected the raw captured video file in the Share/Create Disk module, used the default motion menu, and "burned" the vob files of the 7 minute video in 3 minutes flat. (It spent 1.5 minutes of that time making the motion menu.)

No errors, perfect Audio/Video sync.!

John

sportswizdan · Post by **sportswizdan** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 10:18 pm

JC,
So am I understanding correctly that if I would purchase Video Studio 9, after I do my capturing and if I will not be doing any editing...I can take my just captured footage and go right to share and create my DVD, wihout making a video file first? Do you or anyone else on here recomend the purchase of VS9 if i have 8 right now? Is it alot better performance wise? Thanks, Dan

THoff · Post by **THoff** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 10:40 pm

I think that will depend on whether your system is capable of doing the MPEG encoding in real-time. For that you need at least 512MB of RAM, and a fast CPU (3+GHz, preferrably with SSE2/SSE3 instruction set support).

If you are capturing from a DV device that responds to device control, you've got an advantage, because even if UVS falls behind in the transcoding and fills up its buffers, it can stop the DV device, chew through the rest of the capture buffer, and then restart. It would be annoying, but it would be less time-consuming than separate transcoding following the capture.

jchunter · Post by **jchunter** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 11:32 pm

I agree with Torsten that you should have a reasonably fast CPU. I have 3 GHz. CPU with 1GB of memory HT enabled. My CPU ran 54 - 57% busy and the page memory maxed out at 384 MB during the capture.

In the "No-Edit" scenario, with VS9, you could capture, and then (with empty timeline) select Share/Create Disk, select the file you just captured, set your BURN properties, build your DVD menu and burn the DVD. If you burn a R/W disk, just go for it. Check the playback with PowerDVD rather then WMP because the latter has an aspect ratio problem.

All in all, there are so many things that work better in VS9, that I would recommend buying the box version now. (Just don't plan to work with old projects until they fix the video file corruption bug).
John

sportswizdan · Post by **sportswizdan** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 4:45 am

Thanks for the response guys...
My cpu is 3.4 GHz With 1-gig of memory. My computer is hyper thread but how do I tell if that is enabled? I thought it would just be "on" always. The video file corruption bug is in what version? If it is in VS9 as long as I captued my project in 9, then I will be alright? Thanks for your time. Dan