Posted by S. Whitmore on 03/30/06 10:42

I am putting together a DVD (at no cost) for a non-profit
organization, and after various foibles and a platform change (to a
Mac G5 w/ OS X 10.4 and Final Cut Studio) I am now pretty close to
being done with the video editing part. This is my first time to use
DVD Studio Pro. Other than a not-too-difficult learning curve,
things have been going mostly fine (other than it forgetting the
duration of the audio I have on the main menu and setting it back to
10 seconds, making me regularly fix the duration). That is, things
were "mostly fine" until today.

I have five main tracks, one that is an "introductory comments" thing
and then four presentations by four different speakers. All of the
editing is done in Final Cut Pro and I am exporting using Compressor.
I had a pretty good version of the DVD yesterday but I saw a couple
discrepancies that I wanted to fix before sending it off to them for
their review. These were minor things, like making the lower-thirds
consistent and fixing a typo in one of the menus.

All five tracks needed minor adjustments, so I made the fixes in FCP
and re-exported them, using the same settings in Compressor as I had
used before. Of the five, two came through fine. Three, however,
are OK audio-wise but the video is all black, i.e., it looks like
there is no video. If I play the video asset outside of DVD Studio
Pro, such as with QuickTime Player, the video appears fine. It's
only in DVD Studio Pro that they're not working.

I've tried removing those assets from the project and re-importing
them, and I've tried deleting those tracks from the project and
re-creating them, but so far nothing has resolved the problem. At
this point, I'm at a loss for what to do next. I don't really want
to re-export from FCP, especially since the video will play outside
of DVD Studio Pro, and I don't even know if the time doing that would
be of any value.

(After initially posting this in rec.video.desktop a few days ago, I
did try re-exporting one of the presentations from FCP to see if it
would make a difference. Oddly, DVD Studio Pro now shows a thumbnail
from that one, but actually trying to play it in the viewer or
simulator just results in the same all-black result.)

Any ideas about what I did wrong or how I can fix these tracks?

TIA,

--
S. Whitmore
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http://www.just-stuart.com/

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