AC3 in SpruceUp?

[wesmoc]

Ok.. I see a gazillion posts about getting AC3 files to import happily into SpruceUp. I must be the only bonehead out there who is having troubles..

I've captured my audio and video via Adobe Premier, did my trimmings, then exported the audio via Export->Timeline->Audio->Microsoft DV AVI to give me an audio only AVI file.

I would normally take that file and run it through AVI2WAV to give me a wav file which I would place in the same directory, as the same name, with the MPEG2 video to be properly slurped in to SpruceUp and give me PCM (large) audio.

However, I found myself in a bad position with one of my home movie DVD's that came out to be 4.55Gig (a little over the 4.48Gig max on the DVD-R). So, I wanted to convert the audio to AC3, which would save me bigtime on space.

I used besweet to convert the original AVI to AC3, but SpruceUp gives me a "Media Detection Error" when it tried to import the audio..

What am I doing wrong?!

[Jho928]

Hi,I am no expert but my experiences with this taught me to make sure the ac3 is 48 khz and 384 kbs bitrate or Spruce will not take it.Also be sure the ac3 is the same name as your video source .
Example: AAA.m2v and AAA.ac3.

[wesmoc]

Yup.. it MUST be named the same, with the extension corresponding to the file type:
name.ac3
name.m2v

And only then with SpruceUp even look at it.

I was never able to get BeSweet to encode the WAV (PCM) file as an AC3 file that SpruceUp would take. The only way I could get it to work was to feed everything into DVDit! PE and build from there (selecting "Leave temporary files"). When DVDit! was done, I would grab the resulting AC3 file and use that when making the DVD via SpruceUp.

I would use DVDit! PE to build the DVD rather than SpruceUp, but DVDit's interface is absolutely horrible. SpruceUp is a pain in the rear when it comes to making the chapter marks, and, honestly, I didn't think anyone could do it worse, but Sonic managed to create an interface to chapter marks that was the bottom of the barrel in design.

[Videomania]

Sorry I can't understand your last step.
Then why you use SprucUp instead of finishing your recording with DVDitPE.
Thanks.

[wesmoc]

I needed a way to convert the audio from PCM to AC3, mainly for file compression. If the DVD that I was working on was to be created with PCM audio, because the PCM audio is VERY large, I was only able to fit about 1hr and 4 minutes of video+PCM Audio on a DVD-R. With AC3 audio (compressed PCM), I can go as much as 1hr and 20 minutes.

I tried the freeware application BeSweet and used its v0.1 AC3 encoder, but something with it is hosed as it created an ac3 file, but SpruceUp wouldn't even read it in.

So, as an alternative, I used DVDit! PE, which has an AC3 encoder. There is a selection in the options to have DVDit! leave the temporary files around after building the DVD, and I selected that. I then ran DVDit! PE through creating the DVD in a directory on my hard drive, and then I took the temporary file it left behind (the AC3 file), and fed that in to SpruceUp.

From there, I was able to do the authoring as I wanted.

It is a pitiful work-around, but, alas, it works.

The reason I do not use DVDit! PE to do all of the authoriing is two fold:
o The interface to handling chapter marks is so pitifully piss poor that I cannot get it to work reliably. It is forever telling me that I need more than 5 frames between chapter makrs, even though I double-clicked halfway through the timeline.
o It ALWAYS re-encodes the m2v file if you have one. I do not trust Sonic's encoder (ever use MyDVD? Not a great encoder, that is for sure).

Now, if I could get the chapter stuff to work right under DVDit! PE, I would use that just for the sake of simplicity...