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  1. Member
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    I am a newbie. I want to add sub-titles to a DVD of a wedding video that I shot and edited in Final Cut Pro. I tried twice, using two different kinds of settings, but I encountered an error in both attempts, right at the very end, I believe, in both cases, in regards to the audio.

    The video segment is fine, I believe. Both conversion attempts generated a movie.mpv file that is precisely the same file size and that contains the sub-titles, which were provided via a .SRT-formatted text file. I was always able to see the sub-titles during the preview process prior to starting the encoding. I could also see the sub-titles burned in over the imagery when I viewed the (silent) video via the VLC Player. So, I think that the video is good to go.

    It is the conversion of the audio, I believe, that is resulting in the failure at the very end. Being inexperienced, I would suppose that I am not getting the settings correct, but I do not know what those setting should be.

    I took screen captures of the settings of all the tabs during both attempts, and I also saved the logs by cutting and pasting the data in Text Edit files. So, I can provide that information, if necessary, to help in diagnosing what the problem might be and in coming up with adjustments in the settings. Those logs are very long, so I wouldn't dare copy and paste all that information here without being asked to do so. Someone would have to instruct me as to what the relevant portions in those logs might be.

    I don't know if this information is pertinent or not, but, in selecting the file(s) to be used as the source, I could never drag the enclosing folder of the Video_TS and Audio_TS folders onto the "From" field of the Summary window and get "VOB" to show up there. The best I could do was drag the Video_TS folder to the "From" field and get "Video_TS" to show up there. That did result with specs of the audio portion of the DVD showing up in the corresponding audio window, so I assumed that that the way the program works. But I am not sure about this. After the first attempt ended in failure, I adjusted the settings for the audio conversion, but those settings failed, too, albeit with a different error message.

    I now need help to set this up right, else I'll just be guessing what the right combination could be.

    My primary question has to do with getting both the video and audio conversions to be correctly set up for the next pass. But, out of curiosity, I also wonder that, since the video conversion does seem to have been successful, can the next attempt only occur with an audio conversion? And, if so, how would I combine the successful video and audio conversions together to burn a DVD?
    Last edited by bowlerboy; 4th Oct 2011 at 04:51. Reason: proof-read, correct typos
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  2. Explorer Case's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by bowlerboy View Post
    I took screen captures of the settings of all the tabs during both attempts, and I also saved the logs by cutting and pasting the data in Text Edit files. So, I can provide that information, if necessary, to help in diagnosing what the problem might be and in coming up with adjustments in the settings. Those logs are very long, so I wouldn't dare copy and paste all that information here without being asked to do so. Someone would have to instruct me as to what the relevant portions in those logs might be.
    Please post the complete log. It may be wise to attach this long log as a file, using the "Upload files/Manage attachments"-button. This should keep the post length itself reasonable by showing just a file icon with download link instead of showing the full log contents. Plain text file (.txt) or compressed archive (.zip) is okay.

    Originally Posted by bowlerboy
    I don't know if this information is pertinent or not, but, in selecting the file(s) to be used as the source, I could never drag the enclosing folder of the Video_TS and Audio_TS folders onto the "From" field of the Summary window and get "VOB" to show up there. The best I could do was drag the Video_TS folder to the "From" field and get "Video_TS" to show up there. That did result with specs of the audio portion of the DVD showing up in the corresponding audio window, so I assumed that that the way the program works. But I am not sure about this.
    The app allows file input of many formats, and folder input if this folder is named VIDEO_TS. The latter is the correct way to use a ripped DVD as source.

    Originally Posted by bowlerboy
    I also wonder that, since the video conversion does seem to have been successful, can the next attempt only occur with an audio conversion?
    Even better: Most likely you can use the original audio without any conversion, as that was valid for DVD as well.
    To copy just the audio, I recommend MPEG Streamclip, as its demuxer performs cleaner than the one in ffmpegX.
    Open VTS_01_1.VOB in MPEG Streamclip. It will ask you if you want (just this file or) the whole DVD. Click Yes. It will ask you which title, if there are more than one. Most common, select Title 1 for the main feature. It will ask if you want to fix time code breaks. Click Fix now. Keep 'Do not skip frames' checked, Proceed.
    Menu File > Show Stream Info. Looks at the audio tracks displayed, notice the format (e.g. AC3). Close the window.
    Menu File > Demux > Demux to AC3 (or whatever the audio format was in the previous step).
    You now have a copy of just audio stream, to be re-used in your altered copy.

    Originally Posted by bowlerboy
    And, if so, how would I combine the successful video and audio conversions together to burn a DVD?
    The program interface has six tabs (Summary, Video, Audio, Filters, Options, Tools). Select the Tools tab. Select the Mux sub-tab. Select you video source (.mpv or .m2v), select your audio source (.ac3 or .mp2), set mux profile to 'DVD', set Authoring to 'DVD (VIDEO_TS)', and Mux. Besides an intermediary file (.mpg), the output should be a new VIDEO_TS folder, ready to preview in Apple DVD Player or ready to image it and/or burn to disc.
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    Thanks, Case, for a most informative reply. I’m not sure how much use I will get from this tool in the coming months and years, but I can see that it is certainly a powerful application, if one can get a hold of it. Accordingly, I just sent in my $15 to register and support its development. Even if I don’t get much use out of the application itself, I feel that I will get a chance to fill in the holes in my education regarding digital video techniques via this forum, its associated forums, and the projects I engage in along the way to improve my skills in this area. So, I hope you can bear with me as I raise naive questions now and then.

    In order not to burden you or place any demands of your time, let me leap ahead for a moment regarding the sub-titling project at hand. I may wish to come back to deal with the information in your reply, but, at the moment, I wish to push ahead to ask you something else.

    As it turns out, I somehow managed on my own to adjust the audio and video settings so that I succeeded to get clear access to both the video and audio portions of the source Video_TS folder. For the time being, I’ll just skip over how I bungled into getting a successful result, because I was actually engaged in a test that was intended only to strip out the audio portion so that I could see if I had managed to get clear access to the audio. Yet, I somehow inadvertently managed to set in motion an operation that gave me not merely the audio alone, but also the video, plus the sub-titles burned in, as I had originally set out to do.

    Obviously, at the moment I am just a reckless driver in the seat of a powerful vehicle over which I appear to have no control over how to steer it in the direction I want it to do.

    Nonetheless, on the face of things, it would appear that I have succeeded in achieving my objective of easing the pain of getting over 200 sub-titles burned in on top of the images of my source video.

    I had hoped so, but I’m not quite happy with the result I got, for several reasons. Again, this may be due to my own inability to choose the right settings, or it may be due to some inherent limitations in the underlying codecs and conversion procedures which this tool calls upon. I want you to tell which factor is the controlling factor here.

    In the first place, I used a DVD that provided full-screen 640x480 video, but, by relying on the default settings of the mpeg2enc video codec, I ended up with letterbox 720x480 video which presents a distorted image on both the computer screen on my TV set. Was that my fault, or it that inherent in the codec?

    Also, the image quality that resulted from the conversion process is decidedly inferior to the quality of the image on the source DVD. The colors lost their snappy contrast: everything looks much more muted and soft, sort of what you might get in analog video if you took a VHS tape and dubbed it down about 4 or 5 generations.

    On top of that, I ended with visible and occasionally annoying interleaved video lines, even though when I had burned the original Panasonic Mini-DV source footage onto the DVD using Compressor in Final Cut Pro, I had de-interleaved the video to eliminate such distractions. Again, is this my fault for getting an inferior image quality, or this something that is inherent in the video codec that I used and the default settings which I relied on?

    In short, while I like this tool’s ability to streamline the sub-titling process, I don’t really like the image quality that I got. It is not acceptable to me, especially since I can do a direct comparison between what I got when I burned the DVD from the .m2v and .aiff files which Compressor delivered to me and what ffmpegX delivered to during this conversion of the VOB files on the DVD that I copied onto my hard drive for ffmpegX to work on.

    I need someone with the technical expertise and experience to tell me which is which here, so that I can decide how to proceed. Again, I have taken screen captures at every step of the way so that I can record the settings I used, and I saved the log in a TextEdit file, should it be necessary to review them and decide a course of action regarding changing the settings, changing the source files, or abandoning ffmpegX altogether and toughing it out by creating the sub-titles one-by-tedious-one within Final Cut Pro itself.

    For my own testing purposes, I have just exported a short, six-minute segment of the footage from my FCP project, and I am prepared to use it as the source material with which to conduct further tests within ffmpegX. I did this in order to cut down on the rendering/conversion time that ffmpegX takes to go through its processes. At this juncture, I just need to know if it’s worth bothering to conduct such tests at all, if the image quality of what I get from the conversion process is so inferior to what I start out with. Please enlighten me. Thanks.
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  4. Explorer Case's Avatar
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    It is hard to tell from you post if settings are responsible for the bad image quality, and which settings and values are responsible for such, without looking detailed at everything you did.

    I now would like to suggest a different approach, which allows you to keep the current video quality by not really converting at all, and opting for selectable subtitles instead, which will be overlaid at playback time.
    To do so, you'll need to extract the DVD movie as a single .mpg file. MPEG Streamclip can do this, as can several other tools. See this thread for details (MPEG Streamclip is in post #5).
    Next, in ffmpegX, go to the Tools tab, Author sub-tab. Add the .mpg file, add the .srt subtitle file. Set Author as DVD, set Subtitle font and text encoding. Click the Author button.
    You subtitle file will be converted to a DVD compliant bitmapped subtitle stream and muxed into the mpeg and authored as DVD folder.
    The subtitle may be set to OFF when playing, so use the controls (remote) to activate them.
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    I don’t think it’s polite to leave threads unresolved when people have been kind enough to offer their help. So, as I wrap up this project, let me attempt to close off this topic and share what I have learned.

    You suggested, Case, that, in order to optimize my image quality in the process of ending up with a sub-titled movie, I utilize a single .mpg file as the video file for my video source is conceptually similar to the same suggestion that Major gave me in a private email he sent following an inquiry I sent him in connection with paying for a license. Your suggestion, also, that I use add the .SRT file to a single .mpg file and author the DVD via the Tools tab is also functionally the same as what Major directed me to do.

    The only difference is that you suggested that I use a utility like MPEG Streamclip, whereas Major suggested that I use the original .m2v video file and the original .aiff audio file that Final Cut Pro produced for me, via the Compressor tool associated with FCP. Thus, there was no need for me to use a utility like MPEG Streamclip to strip out the video from the DVD video: I merely had to go to the step prior to burning a DVD video and use the video and audio files of my my originally edited FCP sequence.

    Your suggestions, Case, are already included in this thread. So, for completeness and clarity, I will insert Major’s suggestions as well. Major wrote:

    “I suggest to try the following process :

    “1. Mux video and audio streams into single video+audio MPG file by using tools tab > mux > mux as DVD
    “2. Author subtitles in the resulting MPG file by using tools tab > author > author as DVD and selecting the MPG and SRT subtitle file there

    “This process will not do any re-encoding so that the initial quality will not change.”

    I followed Major’s directions, and they worked quite well. I did, indeed, end up with a DVD which retained the original image quality of my video, while also added sub-titles as a selectable option during playback.

    However, while the sub-titles that were generated as bitmaps via this process were acceptable and legible, I did not consider them very sharp and clear. There was a lot of bleeding into the spaces formed by certain characters, like the “e” and so forth. So, I decided to continue my self-education and training a little bit further by going back into Final Cut Pro and adding sub-titles one-by-one within that editing program itself.

    Once I got a rhythm going, it was not quite as big a chore as I had dreaded. I found out that I could not only exert much more control over the timing and placement of my sub-titles, but that I also had a much wider range of fonts, font sizes, and other attributes to draw upon. I also found out that the sub-titles generated within Final Cut Pro were far superior in terms of crispness and clarity than either of the two methods I had previously tried within ffmpegX.

    So, to summarize and compare the three methods that I used:

    1) Adding sub-titles within Final Cut Pro provided the highest quality text, as well as the widest range of features in terms of fonts, font sizes, placement. The sub-titles generated by Final Cut Pro are permanently burned in with the video imagery that they are superimposed on. The quality of the video imagery you get by exporting your video via FCP itself, will, of course, depend on the settings you choose during the export process, but this video quality will not be degraded due to the addition of the sub-titles. The video imagery will be the same as if you did not blend any sub-titles into your movie.

    2) Adding sub-titles via ffmpegX using the video and audio files exported by Final Cut Pro and then blending them with an .SRT text file in Tools tab of ffmpegX will deliver the same level of video quality that than provided directly by FCP, but the sub-titles may appear softer and somewhat blurry in comparison to the crispness of what FCP’s text generators deliver. The sub-titles produced by this method will not be permanently burned it; instead, they will be selectable, meaning that they will only appear if you elect to have them show up during playback.

    3) Blending sub-titles via ffmpegX using the Filters tab method resulted my getting sub-titles that were permanently burned in with the video imagery, but that video imagery was decidedly inferior to what I obtained (in method 1) by having Final Cut Pro export its edited sequence with the rendered videos generated within FCP, or by what I obtained (in method 2) by adding selectable sub-titles using a single, MUXed mpg file with the .SRT text file via the Tools tab.

    Anyway, that’s a summary of what I learned. If anyone wants to add their insights or correct any errors I’ve made, feel free. Thanks for all the help.
    Last edited by bowlerboy; 16th Oct 2011 at 22:07. Reason: proofread, correct errors
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