Hi I wonder if anyone can help.

I'm using Media Composer and am having some problems sending a sequence to Sorenson Squeeze with a view to authoring a DVD in Sonic DVDit 6.2.

Everything seems to work fine when I prepare the sequence in the Avid (adding a MetaTrack etc). The problem arises when I try to send the sequence to Sorenson & encode it. In the AVID when I go to

File>Send To

Instead of getting File > Send To > Avid editing application product name> Encoding for DVDit.

I get File>Send To>Make new

When I do try to make a new setting, I select Auto Launch Application and set to the Squeeze application, select Auto Load Exported File and set Export MetaSync Track to XML. Sorenson starts up but nothing is loaded.

My specs are Media Composer, Pentium 4 CPU 2.99GHz, 2GB RAM, Windows XP Pro SP2, QT 7.4.5 Windows Media Player 11

Can anyone suggest where I might be going wrong?

Cheers

 Hi James,

I am not in front of my system, but I think you have to go to: file/send to/encoding and a Sorenson preset should pop up. 

BTW QT 7.4.5 is not supported on any Avid version. I suggest you go to the readme of your MC installer and have a look which version of QT you need to use.

Hope this helps.

James,

There is no need to go through Sorenson Squeeze.
If you export a QT-reference file from MC you can import that directly into DVDitPro.

Once imported there will will some transcoding done, but you would be cutting out the transcoding in Sorenson.

I have a tutorial describing my workflow from MC to DVDitPro. It is actually done for a final output on Blu-Ray, but it works in the same way for regular DVDs too.

The tutorial is HERE

Hope it is of some help,

Regards,

Douglas

 When I was using DVDit last time (probably about 2 years ago) it really annoyed me that whenever I changed something on the menu of a DVD that I had authored before, I had to go through the whole transcoding procedure again. In addition to that I found the quality of the encoding not satisfying, to say the least.

I used to create my mpegs in Sorenson or Procoder and then imported them into DVDit. At least that avoided the transcoding.

If you want a great authoring programme have a look at DVD-Lab Pro2. Unfortunately they don't do BR yet.

 Hi AquaPix

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I'll try and install the correct version of QT to see if that helps so thanks for that tip. However the problem is that when i try file/sendto the only other option the AVID offers me is 'Make new'

 Hello Aquapix,

I was just the opposite - I used DVDLabPro until about 1 year ago.
I switched to DVDitPro on a recommendation from support at DVDLabPro!!
The reason was that I was exploring to possibility of exporting my authored material to tape for sending to a replication house. (I will add that I never actually used this feature of DVDitPro and I have heard that it might not work so well as one would hope)

I would also add that according to a statement about 6 months ago DVDLabPro were not considering adding Blu-ray output. But things change in this day and age, so don't take that as written in stone.... it's just what I heard about 6 months ago.

The 2 programmes have strengths and weaknesses.
I would add that DVDLabPro is more intuitive.

Regards,

Douglas

 Hi Douglas,

couldn't agree more with you that the two programmes have their strength and weaknesses. In the end they are just tools to finish a job.

On another note (and slightly off topic) someone on this forum pointed out that you have a lot of knowledge about Blue Ray. Since it is just a matter of time for me to go BR I thought I ask you about a good BR burner. Is there a burner you'd recommend. 

 Not wishing to hijack James' thread I will give a quick reply... however if my reply leads to further questions on the topic, maybe a moderator could split the thread and start a seperate one.

I have only tried one burner.
So I really have no experience of other burners.
Should I recommend the one I use?  Maybe I am biased..

Another thing to consider is that I live in japan and the burners available here are not always available in the rest of the world.

That said I use a PanasonicLF-PB271 internal sata burner.
Here we have a choice of about 10 different manufacturers drives.

My burner is 4x - now 6x is becoming all the rage.... BUT.. finding 4x and 6x media is not easy yet.
Also the cost of 4x and 6x media pushes the price of the media up.
Although the costs of media are dropping here in Japan (now about 30% less than 1 year ago) it is still expensive.
I am using rewritable media. Costs more -  but at least you can re-use it if a burn fails.
So far, fingers crossed, I have not had any failures.

James, sorry I got off-track here.

Regards,

Douglas

 We have a Pioneer 202 BD-R burner (US) and disc play fine on Sony BR players.

 Douglas and Fazz, thanks for your input and sorry James for high-jacking this thread.

 Hi Douglas,  Aquapix & everyone - thanks for getting back to me so quickly. Great tutorial by the way Douglas - I'm going to give it a try later.

I took your advice and decided to bypass Sorenson. Actually what I did was Digi Cut my sequence to tape and then record it back to my computer as an AVI file (using Windows Movie Maker!!) I then imported it into DVDit and burnt it as a standard def disc. I have to say the end result wasn't bad - if a rather bizarre way to go about it. But will now try the export solution.

Cheers

James

 Good luck, James!