A Newbie's authoring experience - HELP!

[Tomp1]

I've had my Sony DRU-500AX for 2 weeks now. My system is a AthlonXP 2100 with 512 meg. I have 30 gig free on the c drive.

Been trying to convert and author a number of avi's to DVD. Using TMPEG to convert.

First tried MyDVD. -- program constantly crashed or had audio sync errors.

Tried Ulead Moviefactory2 demo. Works great if I don't use Chapters. Chapters cause a 'Some chapter numbers exceed frames'.

Ulead's response to my query on this was: "We provide demo software so people can check for compatability with their system. If the software doesn't work on your system, we cannot recommend that you purchase this software." Huh?

Without chapters though this software works great. No sync problems.

Purchased DVD Complete but suddenly found that this software converts audio regardless of what video I insert. Doesn't seem to like any format, .wav, .mp2, etc. And every conversion causes jumpy video with huge out of sync problems

Waiting for v. 2.07. It's supposed to be better.

Now trying demo of DVD workshop. Haven't had a lot of time to fool with it but it's kludgy compared to Moviefactory.

I like DVDcomplete but it won't convert the audio correctly. I like Moviefactory but it won't do the Chapters and I'm sort of pissed at support for blowing me off.

Any other suggestions for authoring?

Thanks,

Tom P.

[ASB]

Where does your original AVI come from?
You could take a look at neoDVD. Looks easy, I do not know about quality.

[Tomp1]

I have 2 sources.

1. downloaded movies and episodes of sopranos in .avi both divx and non-divx.

2. I also have some movies I converted from .mov files. These are the Apollo moon landings that I downloaded from NASA. I converted them to .avi (I forget which program I used) Then I converted them to mpeg with tmpeg.


I get the audio sync problems on just about every package except moviefactory2. I have DVDW converting an episode of Sopranos now.
When I get home from work I'll know if that worked.

I'm not sure what the issue is but it's very frustrating. It shouldn't be this hard.

[Paul_W]

I understand your frustration. I'm beginning to believe that there just is no decent authoring program out there that does it all.

Like yourself, I'm planning on trying DVDWS but until then, I've been using DVD Complete with more success than a lot of other programs that I have tried. You might want to consider some of the other options before pointing the finger at DVD Complete for the audio sync problem. I have only had the sync problem with one movie and am suspecting that it originated back in Premier somplace.