Authoring with more than 8 tracks of Audio

[RefresherEllie]

Does anyone know of a DVD authoring programme that will allow me to include more than 8 tracks of audio?

I'm a number of DVD's together and the client wants to include 10 languages onto each....so far I think I'm going to have to dupe the video and put five audio tracks on each, but for one of the DVD's I'm already burning to a 9GB DVD because there's so much media.

Any suggestions gratefully recieved!

Ellie

[Cornucopia]

You won't find it. DVD DOES NOT support more than 8 streams of Audio. And each audio stream only supports up to 6.1 channels, at most.

If you want more than that, you'll have to either create multiple titles on the same (or different) discs. While you would be duplicating the video content, the audio content could be different.

E.G.:
Title1 = VideoA+A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, A7, A8
Title2 = VideoA+A9, A10, A11, A12, A13, A14, A15, A16


Or you could go the VCD-MultipleAudio-Emulation route and put multiple languages into a multichannel single stream. This would allow, say, ~40 languages if you were to use ALL 8 streams, and 5 tracks/channels per stream (you shouldn't use the .1 LFO channel). The problem then becomes compatibility of routing a playback channel to a correct speaker, as you're not using the multichannel configuration as it was normally meant. That could be confusing or worse to the end user.

Or you could skip that and use Subtitles, as there can be up to 32 simultaneous streams there.

BTW, only the better, full-featured and professional authoring apps allow the full complement of tracks/streams.

Scott

[Cornucopia]

Addendum to what I wrote above: Unless you go the Subtitles route, you'll have to be very careful with your bitrate budget!

Scott

[ggtop]

@Cornucopia

I don't think you're right. The limit of 8 audio streams is for the whole VTS, not only for one Title (or PGC) in it. And because you can't reuse the VID/CID from VTS1 in VTS2 e.g. there's no chance to have more than 8 audio streams without duplicating the video content.

ggtop

[Cornucopia]

You misunderstood me.

Yes, there can be no more than 8 simultaneous streams at any and all points in the Disc. But you can have VTS1 have 3 streams, and have VTS2 have 3 streams, and they don't have to be the same 3 streams. I know because I've mastered (and replicated) discs like this before.
Also, when I talked about VTS1 and VTS2, I WAS talking about duplicating the video content - that would be the ONLY thing that was duplicated.
The "language choice" could be a main menu thing that chose not only the stream, but also which VTS to play, just not acting like it's duplicated to the end user.

Scott

[ggtop]

OK, obviously I misunderstood you. It was you speak of titles with the same video content VideoA.

Amin thing is that RefresherEllie knows what will not work.

ggtop

[RefresherEllie]

Thanks all for your suggestions. I decided to duplicate the video tracks and put five tracks of audio on each but I'm now having a nightmare with the scripts I've used in the past to navigate around multi-language DVD's. Is there a knack to this? Or a different way of doing it with duped video files?

Again, any thoughts gratefully received!

Ellie

[Cornucopia]

What scripts? Which app are you using?

What I'd do, for example, might be:

1. Create 1st Run to go to Main Menu. Play on this menu takes you to VTS1 with default audio of stream1. Audio button takes you to Audio select menu.
2. Audio menu has 10 buttons. 1-5 use streams 1-5 on VTS1. 6-10 use streams 1-5 on VTS2. When playing, all options START at time zero of each VT and end back at the main menu. VT1 and VT2 never reference each other except through the audio menu.

This ought to be quite doable in Encore, DVD Architect Pro, DVDLab, Maestro, Scenarist, probably many others.

Note: this kind of setup doesn't allow for full live cycling between all the streams. You couldn't do that easily in any event. To do it at all, you have to know thoroughly how program SPRMs+GPRMs.

Scott

[RefresherEllie]

I'm working in DVD studio Pro. I'm starting with an audio menu with ten options. The first five go to scripts on which I've given each language a value for GPRM0 and the second five for GPRM1. The first five then run down to a promo, then a main menu with four other videos off that. I've set a pre-script for all these videos instructing the GPRM0 values to run the relevant stream of audio. I've done the same for the identical videos with the second five streams of audio with the GPRM1 values. The two separate strands of video and menus never reference one another but when I playback the audio seems totally random. It always works for the first promo video but once I get beyond the main menu, it's chaos! The videos which are supposed to have the second set of five languages are playing audio from the first set.

Is it possible it's just that laptop isn't powerful enough to run the programme properly? I'm working with dual layers discs, about 7.5GB of media. Do I need to set scripts with individual GRPM values? How do I do this for 10 languages when there are only 8 GPRMs?

Any thoughts very very welcome!

Thanks,

Ellie

[Cornucopia]

Remember that GPRMs are 16bit slots and you shoudn't waste all those bits on just the audio stream choice, you should also memorize the video stream choice. So make GPRM0 be Audio stream and GPRM1 be VideoTitle. If the VideoTitle changes, do a bitwise shift so the audio preference always matches.
And if you need to keep track of other things, logically split up the bit segments of a GPRM (like MSB and LSB, etc).

Scott