Well, to all others, curious and wanting to test bluray, start with a small project, use QT ref files, create a folder or an image file and test if all works well for the first time, no discs and no burners involved.

Hi Richard,

rward39571:

sorry I wasted your time

Just in case you ever come back, I'll explain again here what I explained in my PM to you.  I'm not at all bothered by DVD-making questions.  Making DVDs is complicated.  There are lots of questions about DVD-making here, and we do our best to help.

What bothers me is people making multiple posts about a single problem.  Not only does it clog up the forum, but it leads to duplication of effort, as new people start offering suggestions that may have already been suggested and tried.  In addition, it is disrespectful to people who have already attempted to help for you to ignore their efforts and repost your issue in an attempt to get new answers.

This is why I joined your new thread to your old thread on the same subject, not because I'm upset that you're asking questions.  There's no need to get sensitive.

good luck,
Carl

And Richard, it's our standard practice if we want to move a post back to the top of the list, to reply and simply type "bump" in the text field and maybe "any other ideas from anyone else?". This helps us maintain some kind of continuity, instead of having duplicated threads. It also helps us help you faster. I hope that makes the situation a little more clear. Merging of threads is not uncommon here.

I was a bit interested in this thread as it was 720 p and thought that it might be interesting to see what Avid dvd could create when it comes to bluray from a QT ref file from that type of source media.

Larry Rubin:

Douglas:

Here's why you don't defrag the media drives.
When Avid creates an associated media file, it is not a single unbroken entity. Avid deliberately breaks it into media stream fragments which it scatters across a drive, partition, or drive array for storage and retrieval, cueing, and assembly for seamless real time playback. Hence the "Media Streams Manager" that you see initializing during the application launch. Fragmentation is at the very heart of how Avid handles media.

You can defrag your system drive if and when you feel it necessary. Just not the media drives.

Larry,
Thank you for the explanation of why one should not defrag the Avid media drives.

In my post about the advice I had gotten from the Roxio forums a degree of ambiguity had crept in.
Let me explain a little clearer this time.

1. As a matter of routine (before any suggestion from Roxio) I had defragged my AVID media drives a few times. I used the same drives as I had used for Liquid -  and Liquid hadn't problems with defragging. So I just kept the same routine there.
Since hearing about Avid's advice NOt to defrag those drives, I have stopped doing that.

2. The media drives I was referring to in Roxio's case were the drives I use to store media other than Avid's.
What I call Avid media drives are used exclusively for Avid media.
My DVDit transcodes and final saves of images for burning are never sent to the AVID media drives.
So, in my case, the defragging of media drives was actually referring to those drives.

Finally it is important, as you have very well described, that Avid's media drives should not be defragged.

Regards,
Douglas

Hi all,

I'm sorry that I took exception to Carl's post. I understand the need to merge threads and that it was nothing personal.

If you look at the thread of the original post, there were a couple of good suggestions before it got badly off track with members jousting. I followed the advice that was offered and none of it worked. I guess I should have just appended an update to the original thread, but I am working under a real time crunch with the beginning of a new semester and spent my whole Christmas break trying to get this to work. What makes this even more frustrating than the run-of-the-mill computer issue is that the transcode process takes so long that I only have the opportunity to try one new thing, two at best, within a day's time. Coming up empty every day is maddening.

I get a great deal of pressure at my university from both colleagues and students to phase out our seven-station Avid lab in favor of Final Cut. One colleague recently asked, "So you're still wedded to Avid, eh?", as though that made me the village luddite. The experience I have had recently has been so frustrating that I am thinking about giving up and just getting a divorce.

Richard

Ok, I will give this a shot, maybe I will become shot myself.

First of all , as we are dealing with two different kind of apps, at least in some of the ways that they behave, are you using Avid dvd or Sonic dvd,

What is the version number?

In your 720 p project, did you transcode your project to DnxHD before sending it as a qt ref file to dvdit?

Could you see if a new folder was created in the same folder as the qt ref files, it should be named ses in the end and have the same name as the qt file in the beginning

Hi Richard,

rward39571:

the transcode process takes so long that I only have the opportunity to try one new thing, two at best, within a day's time

When I'm working out a DVD workflow, I don't try to get a whole sequence onto DVD at first.  My suggestion is to select a small section of your sequence - 30 seconds or so - and do the transcode/export/conversion and burn with that.  That way it'll only take a few minutes to do each step, and you'll know sooner if it didn't work.  Also, when burning, use DVD-RW discs, so you can use them again and again for testing without wasting a bunch.

Once you're able to successfully get 30 seconds from your sequence to DVD, write down what you did, and do it again with your entire timeline, and it won't be a waste of time, because you've already figured out what settings to use.

good luck,
Carl

camoscato:

Hi Richard,

rward39571:

the transcode process takes so long that I only have the opportunity to try one new thing, two at best, within a day's time

When I'm working out a DVD workflow, I don't try to get a whole sequence onto DVD at first.  My suggestion is to select a small section of your sequence - 30 seconds or so - and do the transcode/export/conversion and burn with that.  That way it'll only take a few minutes to do each step, and you'll know sooner if it didn't work.  Also, when burning, use DVD-RW discs, so you can use them again and again for testing without wasting a bunch.

Once you're able to successfully get 30 seconds from your sequence to DVD, write down what you did, and do it again with your entire timeline, and it won't be a waste of time, because you've already figured out what settings to use.

good luck,
Carl

Yes, I think that was about what I recommended in my second post, The probs seems only to be with bluray, not dvd and, as said of both of us, a small 30 sec project using transcoded DnxHd in Avid - QT ref for export and then import that one into a new project in Sonic - Avid Dvd and then exporting to image or folder would be the recommended troubleshooting procedure.

I'll jump back in here with some concrete ideas, based on my own experience and advice I have been given.

1. Look at the tutorial I am placing at the end of this post. Especially watch the section beginning from about 2min. 24 sec, It is about unchecking the "delete temp files"  This way, if the programme stops without warning, you have a good chance of having your transcoded files on your drive. You can pop these transcoded files back into Avid DVD. Those files are already transoded for Blu-Ray and will run straight through the next time you attempt to burn to disc.

2. Do not use the default settings in Avid DVD as to the placing of the temp files/ the Project files or the Final outputted .gi blu-ray file structure.
Change these default directories to another drive THAT YOU CAN DEFRAG at regular intervals.
I had similar problems as described in this thread until I began defragging the drive before burning projects.
As Avid warn against defragging the Avid Media drives.... don't put your Blu-Ray/DVD stuff on them.

I use QT reference files. The referred media is on my Avid Media drives - that is not a problem.
The problem usually comes at the writing to disc or writing to image step. That should be happening on your defragged drive!

Good luck with your continued attempts,
Douglas

Douglas, don´t you think that a 30 secs 720p project would work with most settings, changing to much and get it to work might actually make it more difficult to solve the prob as we don´t know what of the changes made that made it work.

This might just be a codec prob or maybe he is using a file without the correct ses folder, creating a new 30 secs project and run it from scratch might make it easier to find the prob, no matter if the discs are fragmented or where all the folders are stored.

mjolnarn:

Douglas, don´t you think that a 30 secs 720p project would work with most settings, changing to much and get it to work might actually make it more difficult to solve the prob as we don´t know what of the changes made that made it work....................

Of course that is probably true, Tomas.

My post was not meant to interrupt the flow of help between you and the Rward39571.
It was meant as a pointer to anyone reading this thread on a couple of tips that I consider very important.

It would be a shame if Rward39571 did the small test and succeeded, then went ahead and tried the full job without making the changes I am suggesting ...... and failed in the middle of the burning again.

I hope you get it ironed out.

Regards
Douglas

Thanks everybody. It's going to be a couple of days before I can get back to it. I'll let you know what progress I've made.

Richard

 I have edited both HDV Projects and HDCAM Projects. I was able to make good DVDs in SD with Avid DVD by Sonic (I could make SD copies all day.), as well as Blu-Ray copies as long as my Blu-ray file size was under 2GBs. Anything larger, I got the same error as Richard. After I upgraded to DVDit Pro HD, I've had no problems.

Kent

I am using version 6,3 of Sonic Dvdit Pro HD on my XP machine and I have done that for some year, never have any probs, not with dvd and not with bluray.

I am not satisfied with my new version of Avid Dvd 6,0 - 6,4, running on my Vista 64 system, at least not when it comes to bluray creating, dvd works well if you use Qt ref files, not preencoded ones.