Importing audio assets into Sonics' ReelDVD

[walter4h]

Hi, guys:
I have elementary video streams and their associated *.wav files. According to ReelDVD user manual, I first have to import all the assets and establish the links. However, when I drag WAV files into the storyboard area, they stay as WAV, which is not what I want. (I have set the Audio in Project Settings to AC3 output).
After I finished setting all my links, I went to "Make DVD" option, WAVs stayed unchanged up to that point.
I then went to the first track, cleared WAV file from it and then dragged it again, this time to the audio track underneath the video track. Encoder kicked in at that point and produced AC3 file. I repeated this procedure with the rest of the tracks.
Is this the correct way of importing audio assets in ReelDVD?
Even though it seems to work, the program behaves erratically - on a couple of occasions the second audio track was created with the same AC3 file, only the name was modified by the addion of "_1" to it. I was able to clear the AC3 file from it, but could not remove the audio track. Each time encoder was working on the background, without any indication that encoding is in progress.
After the audio in all tracks have been encoded, I wanted to add a few more assets, as encoding WAVs freed some space, but ReelDVD Explorer was not showing any files in the folder, from which I imported the assets. I then had a look with Windows Explorer, all files were there, together with the newly-created AC3s.

Txh walter

[disturbed1]

Not sure what your question is?

You figured out how to encode ac3 with Reel DVD.

About nothing showing in Reel DVDs explorer, try clicking on another folder, then back to the one that showed nothing.

Reel DVD will process in the background. While this going on, though the program appears responsive, it truely is dead until it completes all tasks.

[walter4h]

Yes, as I said, it encodes alright, but it seems to operate erratically - creating extra audio tracks, making a copy of the same AC3 file in another track with "_1.ac3" appendix.
I guess my question boils down to this: should audio assets be imported AFTER all the links between video assets have been established? Somehow the manual is not clear on this.
Regarding to what I perceived as erratic behavior, on a few occasions small screens were popping up with a msg: "encoding... this may take a while" and there was a progress indicator (both a bar and percentage numbers). In the end there was a msg: "AC3 file created successfully". But it was not for all WAVs; I found that confusing.
With regards to an extra track created, as I analysed my trials and errors with trying to figure out ReelDVD, I think it happened after I mistakenly tried to import "*.m2v.vif" into an audio track. ReelDVD gave an error msg, that the stream contains unrecognizable blocks of data.
Somehow I have a whole bunch of files with "*.m2v.vif" extension. Say, I have a file "trip.m2v", and there is also "trip.m2v.vif" in the same folder. Practically all "*.m2v" have this.
I am not sure where they came from, I was playing with several encoders over the last few days.
Well, as they say, you often end up getting to smth through the back door.
Many txh for the help: walter

[anggk]

The "trip.m2v.vif" was created after you import in "trip.m2v" by the program itself.

As for AC3, a better way is to pre-encode before import it into ReelDVD.

Hope this will help.

anggk88@yahoo.com

[walter4h]

follow-up on ".m2v.vif" files:
Yes, as I imported a file into the storyboard, I could see that the one with the same name and ".m2v.vif" extension was created in the same folder. So far I did not see any mention of these files neither in tutorial, nor in Help; so it was a bit of a mystery what they are.
With regards to pre-encoding, that's a good idea. I can preencode them in ReelDVD, then start a new project and use the AC3s which are already there from the previous project.
Thx wh

[walter4h]

Actually, ReelDVD does give a msg "Encoding Audio..." together with the name of the file being encoded. It is at the bottom-left corner of the track window. I guess, after getting a few pop-up msg of this kind, I wasn't paying enough attention to the other ones.
wh