CaptyDVD tips

[Frobozz]

Now that CaptyDVD 2 is downloadable commercial software outside of Japan it seems to me there should be an online place where people can share and learn tips on how to use this rather puzzling yet amazingly flexible DVD authoring application. I thought about starting my own Capty site (maybe using iWeb blog?) but think it might be better located here in this forum as a topic that just keeps growing over time. Maybe we should also include Capty MPEGEdit, PixeVRF Browser and PixeDV tips as well because there is zero online for support for any of these.

But if nobody cares, why should I? I'm not sure where I'd start with my tips: maybe how to get video thumbnails that don't race a 6X speed in the motion menus. Is anyone else using CaptyDVD 1 and 2 willing to offer their tips?

[pianoman719]

Now that CaptyDVD 2 is downloadable commercial software outside of Japan it seems to me there should be an online place where people can share and learn tips on how to use this rather puzzling yet amazingly flexible DVD authoring application. I thought about starting my own Capty site (maybe using iWeb blog?) but think it might be better located here in this forum as a topic that just keeps growing over time. Maybe we should also include Capty MPEGEdit, PixeVRF Browser and PixeDV tips as well because there is zero online for support for any of these.

But if nobody cares, why should I? I'm not sure where I'd start with my tips: maybe how to get video thumbnails that don't race a 6X speed in the motion menus. Is anyone else using CaptyDVD 1 and 2 willing to offer their tips?

I don't own any of the Pixela software titles yet. But I notice Bob Hudson has done a downloadable video tutorial for CaptyDVD 2.

[dofer]

But if nobody cares, why should I? I'm not sure where I'd start with my tips: maybe how to get video thumbnails that don't race a 6X speed in the motion menus. Is anyone else using CaptyDVD 1 and 2 willing to offer their tips?

I do care and would very much like to ear about it, even though I haven't been through all the usual features in CaptyDVD and have not much to offer.
May be we could have both: your blog and the topic!

[Surfmaster]

Hi Frobozz,

I think that's an excellent idea. Maybe you could start by explaining the key differences between CaptyDVD 1 and 2, aside from the motion menu features and newer templates. I myself am deciding whether to spend $70 to get the program.

CaptyDVD can be a little tricky to use but once you figure it out, you can author some good DVDs. I think one of the key features of this software is the ability to create chapter markers, thumbnails of these markers and, of course, the title pages these thumbnails/markers will reside. Maybe the first tip could be how to create chapter markers, their thumbnails and their pages. I find that this key functionality is one of the toughest to master.

Great idea again! Thanks!

[Frobozz]

Surfmaster, I'll explain what I know to be the differences between CaptyDVD 1 and 2

CaptyDVD 2 does everything that version 1 does plus it:
- supports dual-layer-sized projects
- supports direct burning to more drives
- has the option to encode AC3/Dolby Digital audio
- includes the v.1 menus plus 25 motion menu themes for use with both title and chapter menus.
- properly recognizes anamorphic 16:9 MPEGs when authoring the DVD (not yet 100% certain of this)
- the photo slide show feature is enhanced
- is claimed to be faster than v.1 although this may only apply to MPEG encoding which I only have it do for clips in the motion menus.
- has a decent Help menu to learn how to use it

My opinion is that CaptyDVD 2 is a great choice for people who:
- Want fancy menus but are miffed that iDVD doesn't encode AC-3 audio and don't want to buy DVD SP.
- Want to use existing MPEG video files and either want fancier title and chapter menus than Toast 7 offers or want to specifically locate any chapter markers. I typically use Toast 7 but will use CaptyDVD 2 for concert DVDs so I can pinpoint the start of each chapter plus have the song title appear in the chapter menu.

The link in pianoman719's post above to Bob Hudson's site gives the best demonstration of CaptyDVD 2's fundamentals.

[pianoman719]

Thanks, Frobozz. You've done a great job of defining CaptyDVD 2's market niche. It would be great to confirm whether or not it works with 16:9 and film rate MPEGs. (Same question for Capty MPEG Edit EX.) I look forward to any advanced tutorials you may offer. -Pianoman

[Surfmaster]

Hi Frobozz,

Thanks for creating the list. I think I will fork up the $70 and download the program from Pixela's website. I could use the AC3/dolby sound and the motion menus.

I have a question about creating chapter markers. I know how to create chapter markers, their thumbnails and adding them to chapter marker pages. The process is tedious since the slider bar, Quicktime-like interface has no audio. To overcome this shortcoming, I have to play the VHS tape and use that to help me first select the places I want the chapter markers. I then go back to CaptyDVD's slider and the 0.5 second and higher incremental jumper and select the chapter marker. It's tedious but it works.

My question is how do I create chapter markers on one movie without having to creating individual thumbnails and their menu pages? This would be good for digitizing TV shows that I capture on VHS.

In addition, when I do create thumbnails and their menu pages, I have to create a second "play movie" button as the first thumbnail on the first thumbnail menu page. If I don't, then I would just be seeing the first chapter stop in my film, which is really the equivalent of the "second chapter" of your typical Hollywood-produced DVD. This is a big shortcoming of the CaptyDVD, which does not allow you to have a "chapter menu" button next to a "play movie" button on the original title page.

Regarding creating just chapters markers without thumbnails and their menu pages, how do I avoid this potential situation described in the above paragraph? Thanks in advance.

[Frobozz]

If you create markers and don't create a Chapter Menu then the markers will be present in the video DVD without a menu. You also can uncheck the box next to "Use Chapter Menus" that appears in the lower part of the Settings window when you have selected a Title in the Title window. This will eliminate the chapter menu but retain the markers as well. That selection is grayed out if you have not yet created a Chapter menu.

I also wish AC-3 and MPEG audio played in the chapter marking window. I use MPEG Streamclip to select identify the frames where the audio changes so I know where to put the marker in CaptyDVD.

Yes, you must place a chapter marker at the beginning of the video if you plan to have Chapter menus. As you've seen, selecting a Title presents you with page 1 of the chapter menus so the first chapter must be placed at the start or you won't see the beginning of your movie.

Another tip is that in the marker window you can use the arrow keys to move a marker that you have placed. The up and down arrows change the time interval for movement and the left and right arrows move the marker.

[dofer]

In a DVD authored with Capty2, when or after reading a chapter, is there a way i could return to its chapter menu?

when i push the menu button on the preview remote, it always drives to the first button of the first Chapter menu, wether or not i checked "set as menu title" in ChapterMenu/Text. Tricky when you deal with 6 or7 chapter menus...
(no themes,free layout)

[Frobozz]

I've just checked this by playing a CaptyDVD 2-authored DVD on my standalone player.

When I insert the disc I get the top (title) menu. Pressing play gets me the chapter menu. Pressing play on any of the chapters starts playback from that chapter. During playback I can press the Menu button on my remote to return to the first page of the chapter menu. Pressing the Menu button again toggles me back to the playback where I left off. Pressing the "Top Menu" button on my remote takes me to the Title menu and pressing it again toggles back to playback.

I don't know if other DVD players have two different menu buttons like mine (a Pioneer) does.

Does this answer your question?

[dofer]

Thanks Frozbozz, same behaviour on my player.
I would like a chapter to go back to the menu it was launched from,
when pressing the menu button,
but in any case it returns to the first chapter menu.
I will try to turn chapters to movies but i expect the same performance with moviestitle menus. I could also improve navigation through chapters menus with a better button layout.

Are you still on that Capty tips and tricks blog idea?
I could use a lot.

Fred

[donaldxdog]

I just purchased the LaCie fastcoder from LaCie's web site. It came with CaptyDVD2 (full version). All for $99 plus $5 S & H.

[Frobozz]

I just purchased the LaCie fastcoder from LaCie's web site. It came with CaptyDVD2 (full version). All for $99 plus $5 S & H.

That's such a great deal!

My advice is to slowly go through the entire CaptyDVD Help document. It isn't going to all make sense but it is helpful to try to understand as much as you can. The most important tip is - if you are going to create a chapter menu - always place a chapter marker at the very start of the video. The next most important tip is to save as a VIDEO_TS folder so you can test the playback with DVD Player before burning anything to disc.


Fred, I don't think I'll start a CaptyDVD blog after all. I'm partnering with a friend to launch a small business in Oregon to create photo books, DVD slide shows and digital image scanning for people who want to get their family photos out of boxes and into the homes and hearts of their children and grandchildren. My next goal is to become a photo/slide/film scanning guru. Know of any forums I should viisit?

[dofer]

Frobozz i wish you the best for this.
There is a lot to be done in this matter ( my old photos look sad on screen and my excellent APN pictures look poor on prints any settings other than light, contrast or whites correction often lead to... delete all settings!)
Sure you'll give your work the precision i read in your posts, and keep the customer satisfied.

I don't visit forums about scanning, mostly French speaking Mac Forums about video DVD authoring, and find many answers in English speaking forums too. There is no French version of Capty DVD/VCD2 and i had 0 answer to a Capty question on my favourite french forum http://mac-video.desir.fr . So i learn the hard way and this thread is encouraging.
Thanks
Fred

[KMJvet]

When I import 3 1.3 G mpg into CaptyDVD it says they're 1.9 G each and too big to eventually fit on a regular DVD and I'd have to use double layer. Why is this? What can I change so it sees them at the 1.3 files they actually are? thanks

[Frobozz]

When you started your CaptyDVD project what kind of audio did you select? If you chose PCM instead of MPEG Audio or Dolby Digital - and your MPEGs have one of those two compressed formats - then CaptyDVD needs to allow extra space to uncompress the audio to PCM.

[KMJvet]

I selected Dolby Digital. I'm kind of ignorant about the sound stuff and I don't know what PCM is or when you should select it so I didn't.

In case this helps:

Duration: 0:44:47
Data Size: 1.27 GB
Bit Rate: 4.07 Mbps

Video Tracks:
224 MPEG-2, 704 × 480, 29.97 fps, 104.86 Mbps, progressive

Audio Tracks:
192 MP2 stereo, 48 kHz, 128 kbps

[Frobozz]

I'm just guessing here because I've never worked with a progressive MPEG 2 file. My hunch is that CaptyDVD must re-encode that video. If you chose Normal Quality when setting up the project then that is 6 Mbps. Low quality is 4 Mbps and High Quality is 8 Mbps. Since your video is now 4 Mbps then re-encoding it at 6 Mbps will boost its size by 50 percent, which just happens to be what CaptyDVD says how much larger the file will be. So choosing low quality may be the answer. You should be prepared for a lesser-quality picture because of the re-encoding of a low bit-rate video at a new low bit rate.

Rather than change to the low-quality setting you could go ahead and let CaptyDVD create a dual-layer-sized VIDEO_TS folder and then use Toast's Fit-to-DVD to compress it further to fit the single-layer disc. I've done this many times.

Maybe you should abandon trying to make video DVDs from those MPEGs and just play them on your Mac.

[KMJvet]

Your guess seems like a reasonable theory to me. TOAST can cope with progressive in that you set the field dominance to progressive. I wonder if there's a similar option in CaptyDVD. Perhaps I'll putz around looking in preferences and such although Capty's documentation is as dreadful as it gets...lack of clarity in translation I guess.

These are actually different files than my original project so the others for the bigger reauthoring project I want to do may not be progressive, i don't know. I thought I was being smart to try to figure out the program somewhat with a different and easier project, and it seems all I've done is discovered is new mysteries.

[dofer]

For some reason transcoding sound with CaptyDVD results in much bigger files.
When you Demux and re-mux those too big files in MpegStreamclip, those files recover their true size, 50% less.
You could author a Video ts in Capty with no themes, no sounds, no image buttons, no animations, no shadows ..., retrieve the Vob files and open in MpegStreamclip,
demux-remux-save and check the file size. Trash the Capty project and the VTS folder.
Ultimately drop this file (rename XXX.mpg, XXX.mpeg are refused) on a new project in Capty and start authoring, no encoding except for menus.
I can see Capty makes progressive DVD with progressive mpegs, didn't try to mix both progressive-interlaced.

Fred

[dcsos]

I just purchased the LaCie fastcoder from LaCie's web site. It came with CaptyDVD2 (full version). All for $99 plus $5 S & H.

Just ordered fastcoder box for $49.99 w/Capty(refurb one)!
with $10 S&H (didn't see the $5 option at all)

[KMJvet]

Thanks Dofer.....I will see if I can try that out. It sounds straightforward when you explain it although I find Capty hard to work with. Can you clarify for me how you make Capty make a video_TS with no sound?

[dofer]

I meant no background music in menus: this first passage in Capty is only for AC3 encoding purpose, i suggested you disable all menu and button options for a faster job. You obtain a video with sound.
When you open your (too big) file in Mpegstreamclip, if you're asked to open other files from the same stream, just say yes. Then choose "Demux in M2V and AC3" in the File menu.
Drop the M2V file you just obtained on Mpegstreamclip window and
choose "Convert to mpeg". Sound should follow if the AC3 and M2V files are in the same folder. Check this mpeg file in MpegStreamclip.
If everything is fine, you can get rid of the VTS folder and the Capty DVD project too, in case you are short of space: they both home the full video.
Rename your .mpeg .mpg, open a new project in Capty and true work begins...
Fred

[KMJvet]

Thanks...I appreciate your help and I'll try that out.

[KMJvet]

Finally I'm back after trying this out and still no joy.
The process of taking of the VOBs, which play fine, and demuxing in MPEGStreamclip and then converting to mpeg results in out of sync audio. So, that's an MPEGStreamclip actually and not a Capty problems. Anyone have ideas on the chasing down what causes that?

I did go ahead with the flawed MPGs to author a DVD in CaptyDVD and indeed the files stayed at the same size so it was now okay with the audio and didn't want to re-encode it to bigger. But the VIDEO_TS made from this had numerous dropped frames beyond the AV sync issue I knew existed in the mpgs. So, I've still got problems with this aspect too.

thanks in advance for any help on how to chase these issues down.

[dcsos]

Have you ever used CINEMATIZE to take VOB material and covert it to Capty Assets?
This might be better than streamclip

[Frobozz]

KMJvet, what was used to create those source videos? It seems to me that something is wrong with those source files. Either you get audio sync problems from demuxing or you get dropped frames. If these are that important for all this work you're doing maybe you should export them to DV and let CaptyDVD or some other application re-encode them.

dcsos mentions Cinematize. If the source VOBs are still in their VIDEO_TS folder you can give it a try because it handles audio differently than Streamclip. However, it doesn't like flawed source files so it might not work at all with yours.

[KMJvet]

I've been playing with a few different ones...but these particular files started life as avi's and to get VOBs they were coded by Visual Hub using 2 pass and a corrrection to a standard 720x480 since the originals are not quite that and I thought that was necessary in going to DVD?? And they're progressive as we discussed before.
This is what ffmpegx says they are:
mpeg4, yuv420p, 640x368, mp3, 48000 Hz, stereo, 128 kb/s
video: [XVID] 640x368 12bpp 25.000fps, 980.7 kbps (119.7 kbyte/s) audiocodec:framecopy (format=55 chans=2 rate=48000, bits=0 B/s=13798 sample-0
A lot of that is greek to me.
This is what ffmpegx spits out about the VOBs VH makes when I just picked one at random: Mpeg @ Program Stream File [Video/Audio] Muxrate: 10.08 Estimated duration: 04:0428.50
Aspect ratio 16/9 (large TV)
Not interlaced, chroma format 4:2:0
Size [720x480] 29.97 fps 8.00 Mbps
Audio : Mpeg 1 layer 1 256 kbps 44100 Hz Stereo no emphasis


These VOB created in VisualHub files themselves seem fine, playing-wise although I don't know if that above info says they're really not. Video quality is great for something converted from avi. They play beautifully in VLC or MPEGStreamclip.
And a VIDEO_TS containing them plays perfectly in Mac's DVD Player if you let Visual Hub do the next step and author them (it just means 3 files become one long movie). Now I haven't burned the VIDEO_TS created by VISUAL HUB just as is to see what my two stand alone players think of it.
What I wanted to achieve out of CaptyDVD was a nice menu, chapters and background music, and to get the episodes in order without reencoding.
Does that seem to fit it being a problem with the avis, or more correctly the VOBs that Visual Hub creates from them, having a defect?

The big project that I want to do the files are DVDs I made of some old TV episodes from the 50s and 60s that I transferred from VHS, but they lack pretty menus and I got some missing eps and some updgrades from the film transfers. So, when I get this all sorted, the original source files on that will actually be different because those already exist as DVD although they were created by a stand alone player and so they're going to have those problematic time code breaks. I wonder how Cinematize does with that.

[KMJvet]

The mpgs made by Cinematize seem good...in sync when played by VLC. Now to try the CaptyDVD part....

[KMJvet]

The Capty DVD part of this is now working too. The chapter buttons don't really navigate for me as expected, but other than that, I've got it working fine now and I appreciate all the coaching.