Audio Question.... newbie, please explain????

[Vanna]

Hi,
I use NeoDVD to create DVD's, in the options menu under "Audio", it has 3 options: LPCM, Dolby Digital, MPEG.

I have to use MPEG for the sound to work on my standalone DVD player. If I use LPCM, no sound comes out. The "Dolby Digital" options is shaded out so I cannot select it... why??

How do I get the best sound?? I author using Showbiz then I create the MPEG2 file for DVD, the sound is usually "tinny" and the mp3's that I put in are much louder than the dialogue in the footage, so I constantly increasing and decreasing the volume on my TV.

Aplogies in advance for my ignorance.

[MOVIEGEEK]

"I have to use MPEG for the sound to work on my standalone DVD player. If I use LPCM, no sound comes out. The "Dolby Digital" options is shaded out so I cannot select it... why??"

My guess is you need to buy the plugin or upgrade,try TMPGEnc.

[theDruid]

What's most likely happening is that you're feeding mp3's in as the audio source, and they're being re-encoded to mp2 (which I believe is the only MPEG format supported for audio in (S)VCD/DVD). This often seems to cause problems.

I would recommend that you convert (decompress) the mp3 audio into 16-bit PCM (wav), and normalise it, before you feed it in to Showbiz (if this is possible - I don't know this software).

There are a large number of audio tools you can use for this.

e.g. SoundForge, CoolEdit, GoldWave, Audacity (from left ot right -expensive to free)

Can you set the bitrate for your MPEG audio within ShowBiz? mp2 doesn't tend to sound to great below about 192kbps. VCD has 224kbps as standard.

Converting the audio to wav and normalising it before feeding it into ShowBiz should improve the quality in the output, and solve your problem with uneven audio.

cheers,
mcdruid.

[Vanna]

Thanks very much, will try to do this.

Obviously "normalising" is performed within this software also????

[theDruid]

Yes it is - normalise basically means to increase the volume to the loudest it can be without any clipping.

In SoundForge it's under Process->Normalize

In GoldWave it's under Effects->Volume->Maximise

and in Audacity I think it's under Effects->Amplify

For the simpler form of normalisation (of the three above, I think only SoundForge can do it any different), set the maximum to 98% or something like that.

cheers,
mcdruid.