Modern DVD-A authoring programs

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schultz1010

Active Member
Joined
Jul 14, 2015
Messages
78
Does anyone have an idea what tools are being used for DVD-A production today? There is a trickle of new releases coming out and I don't see companies using old versions of Discwelder or Sonic DVD creator for the job. Are Sony, Panegyric, etc using programs they've cobbled together in-house or is there some commercial software that's available but an industry secret (at some $$$ price no doubt)?
 
Hmmm, Panygeric is/was doing the YES discs and at one time Neil disclaimed knowledge of 'Yes Fragile'

https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/fo...cWelder-Chrome-2-quot-Gotchas-quot-Be-careful

Chrome's long obsolete (not to mention limited and has some severe limitations/bugs - mentioned above) and Sonic's product doesn't run well past Windows XP (according to another post Neil's made). That got me to wondering what's being used today? Is Neil carefully keeping an XP system with Sonic alive in a lab for the DVD-A biz? :yikes

Hi , I do not think it is Sony and Panygeric that are using an authoring program. It is Opus Production, i.e. Neil Wilkes and Claire Bidwel, who prepare the dvd-a's including layout and authoring.
 
Panygeric is/was releasing the YES (Fragile) DVD-A and a while back Neil disclaimed any knowledge of that disc

https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/fo...cWelder-Chrome-2-quot-Gotchas-quot-Be-careful

Chrome's long obsolete, more than a bit buggy and quite limited (according to many posts Neil's made). Sonic's product doesn't run well past Windows XP according to other posts from Neil (can't find that one right at the moment). HD Solo doesn't do MLP. That got me to wondering and finally posting the query last night - what are companies using today?. Is Neil carefully keeping a Windows XP system alive with Sonic Creator to produce all the DVD-A discs being released today? :yikes

Hi , I do not think it is Sony and Panygeric that are using an authoring program. It is Opus Production, i.e. Neil Wilkes and Claire Bidwel, who prepare the dvd-a's including layout and authoring.
 
Maybe Neil will chime in but given all the things written about Discwelder Chrome I doubt he's using that - it wasn't a professional piece of software even when it was new.

https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/fo...cWelder-Chrome-2-quot-Gotchas-quot-Be-careful quite plainly says that the nice active menus without gaps can't be done - yet all (or many) of the DVD-A discs I have play without gaps or the buttons going off/on at the track changes.

The Cirlinca product doesn't handle active menus at all from what I can see and specifically says there's no support for MLP audio - which almost all DVD-A discs use.

That leaves the Sonic DVD Creator product - another long discontinued piece of software - that according to Neil doesn't run well on systems past Windows XP. The mental image of the world's DVD-A production depending on an XP system in a lab wobbles the mind :yikes

So other than those three programs what is there and what is being used today for the DVD-A discs that are being produced today? Inquiring minds want to know :)
 
I use Chrome on my Windows 10 machine and ,though it doesn't do anything other than a simple menu, it still works well enough for me. I belive that Neil uses Sonic Scenarist but I may be mistaken.

Chrome will do gap less with a long MLP file and adding track markers.
 
Oh Chome will run but try making a DVD-A that looks/behaves like one of the commercial discs. You can't assign menus to trackpoints! Read the link

https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/fo...cWelder-Chrome-2-quot-Gotchas-quot-Be-careful

If you use individual tracks you can have a menu per track - and that menu can point to lyric sheets, playlists, etc all while the audio is playing. But there is a gap between tracks that you can't get rid of. A gapless MLP track with points can have still images per trackpoint but not an active menu. Go ahead and try it :(

No, Neil uses Sonic DVD-Audio Creator. Scenarist is for DVD-V(video). Both are discontinued products. It's back to my question: what are the DVD-A discs being made today? Are obsolete/un-supported programs being used or is there something internal to the industry that's not known /available to the public?

I use Chrome on my Windows 10 machine and ,though it doesn't do anything other than a simple menu, it still works well enough for me. I belive that Neil uses Sonic Scenarist but I may be mistaken.

Chrome will do gap less with a long MLP file and adding track markers.
 
Panygeric is/was releasing the YES (Fragile) DVD-A and a while back Neil disclaimed any knowledge of that disc

https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/fo...cWelder-Chrome-2-quot-Gotchas-quot-Be-careful

Chrome's long obsolete, more than a bit buggy and quite limited (according to many posts Neil's made). Sonic's product doesn't run well past Windows XP according to other posts from Neil (can't find that one right at the moment). HD Solo doesn't do MLP. That got me to wondering and finally posting the query last night - what are companies using today?. Is Neil carefully keeping a Windows XP system alive with Sonic Creator to produce all the DVD-A discs being released today? :yikes
I was not disputing that Panygeric is releasing the Yes titles, it was just that the labels do not author the discs.
 
I was not disputing that Panygeric is releasing the Yes titles, it was just that the labels do not author the discs.

and i was in error on the label that released the Yes title referenced in the link I gave. That was a while back and was a Warner release I think - and it's possible Warner was a big enough outfit to do their own authoring (and I doubt they used Chrome even back then).

Question's still the same though - what is the current crop of DVD-A discs being authored with (without regard to label :)) ?
 
and i was in error on the label that released the Yes title referenced in the link I gave. That was a while back and was a Warner release I think - and it's possible Warner was a big enough outfit to do their own authoring (and I doubt they used Chrome even back then).

Question's still the same though - what is the current crop of DVD-A discs being authored with (without regard to label :)) ?
no problems :brew Neil,is no so active anymore, but maybe he joins in soon to shine a light on this.
 
Yes, I think he does....but it's EXPEN$$$$$$IVE!!!!!

Scenarist would be used for the VIDEO portion of a hybrid DVD-A but not for the AUDIO portion. Scenarist was also discontinued shortly after ROVI bought Sonic. I see that a group of folks have bought the rights to Scenarist from ROVI Corp and are bringing out HD/BluRay/etc versions of Scenarist.

Scenarist would be used as the spec based DVD-Video authoring tool to create the VIDEO_TS that is imported into the DVD-A authoring tool but Scenarist itself was not a DVD-A tool. For DVD-A creation there was another Sonic program called Sonic DVD-Audio Creator which is LONG SINCE discontinued. Neil made a comment once that the program didn't run on systems past Windows XP.

Today for doing the proper VIDEO_TS creation for hybrid DVD-A discs the tool of choice (and there is an excellent tutorial on the videohelp forums) is DVDLab Pro 2 but for the DVD-A creation there are only the programs mentioned earlier in the thread (#4 and 5)
 
Panygeric is/was releasing the YES (Fragile) DVD-A and a while back Neil disclaimed any knowledge of that disc

I think you are confusing two different releases of the album.

Neil made that comment in 2006 and would have been referring to the original 2002 release.

The Panygeric release is due to be released in ocotber 2015, and Neil will have been involved init's production.
 
The conflation of the two releases was already admitted (see #9).

He didn't use Chrome then and I doubt very much he'll be using it today. Sonic DVD-A Creator was the only other tool available (to the public) at the time - is it being used today?

Many of the nice features people like to see / use on DVD-A aren't possible using the tools that are known to us - that was true in 2006 and is still true today :(

DVD-Video is different - there are tools that we can obtain for a few $ and can make some excellent DVD-V discs.

So what's being used to create the new discs that are being released? Maybe if Neil comes up for air and is allowed to (or desires to) speak he can clue us in to how DVD-A discs are being made

I think you are confusing two different releases of the album.

Neil made that comment in 2006 and would have been referring to the original 2002 release.

The Panygeric release is due to be released in ocotber 2015, and Neil will have been involved init's production.
 
as far as i know there are none of new appz to author DVD-A.
all DVD-A which still coming out were done in Sonic or Discwelder.
DVD medium is already past and doesn't make for software developer any sense to do new software.
as for compatibility of obsolete software, well, if you doing it for living you always can use separate PC with older OS just for this purpose.
 
The conflation of the two releases was already admitted (see #9).

Apologies - I confess was skimming.

I think Sonic Studio's "professional" product (as opposed to the "commercial" product available to the general consumer) was called Sonic Studio HD and DVD Creator.

Minnetonka also produced a "professional" product in conjunction with another company called M.A.S.S. 5.1.
 
Apologies - I confess was skimming.

I think Sonic Studio's "professional" product (as opposed to the "commercial" product available to the general consumer) was called Sonic Studio HD and DVD Creator.

Minnetonka also produced a "professional" product in conjunction with another company called M.A.S.S. 5.1.

Not a problem - I've done the same thing, jump into a conversation without reading the whole thing.

I had not head about M.A.S.S. until recently - it was only last night, while looking for information about Sonic's products, I saw a reference to M.A.S.S. Nothing on Minnetonka's website mentions it (I haven't found any references yet).

Neil said this in April 2005 (it's from a QQ post) about DVD-Audio Creator

"Comes in a couple of flavours - DVD-Audio Creator LE and full versions
$5,000 to $15,000 a throw and it makes a lot of assumptions about what is installed. It will expect to see Sonic Studio HD for one.
Sonic Studio HD is the "add on" component that handles the Audio preparation, and you also need "One Click DVD" to deal with the MLP and LPCM encoding.
To quote from Sonic,
DVD-Audio Creator is an authoring solution for mastering audio, video and graphical elements prepared in complementary applications from Sonic"

There does seem to be an increased interest in DVD-A today. Wikipedia's article mentions the format being extinct in 2007 so it's quite interesting to see new discs coming out today. Maybe there's hope for the software too :)
 
Documentation (user guides, etc) about Sonic's products is in exceedingly difficult to find (when Sonic went away the information went away too it seems) - most of the links that come up are to bogus/questionable download sites. I finally did find a draft copy of the DVD-Audio Creator user guide (incomplete with sections "Under construction" or with gibberish text). From what I can see Creator isn't a single/integrated program but rather a set of near-commandline type of programs that assemble pre-made assets. Thus you don't need Sonic Studio HD or One Click DVD at all - if you can create the audio files using the compressors/editors of your choice that's fine, ditto for the menus, etc. The problem is a lot of the "heavy lifting" for navigation and the like needs to be done using Scenarist scripting and documentation for that is as hard or harder to find as for DVD-Audio Creator.

If the folks at Mediachance.com (who make DVDLab Pro) did a DVD-A tool it'd probably be a couple hundred dollars and be a heck of a lot easier to use than Sonic's software :howl Maybe I'll make that suggestion to them - can't hurt to try :)
 
Only just spotted this thread, as we have been kinda very busy lately (hence the slowdown in activity lately)
Our authoring systems are a combination of tools, depending on exactly what we need to get done so here goes:

DVD-Video discs:
Sonic Scenarist SD, with the DTS MAS series encoder & the SurCode AC3 encoder (when used) on a Windows 7 64-bit system (Scenarist SD is a 32-bit application though)

DVD-Audio/Video discs:
Video_TS is done with either Scenarist SD or Media Chance Labs DVD-Lab Pro 2 (both on Windows 7 64-bit systems) depending on the content.
To explain.
Scenarist cannot create a slideshow with song markers that can be addressed. This is because it creates the separate images at the wrong level (VOBU instead of CELL) so whilst I can set up a timed slideshow to a high res stereo stream, you would not be able to access individual tracks. If I have to use a slideshow then I use DVD-Lab Pro, as this allows me to create an "Audio-Only" stream - essentially an I-Frame slideshow with addressable chapter marks but created at Cell level for the images. DVD-Lab Pro also allows you to turn off the abstraction layer at compile time, which is essential.
Both these tools have their problems, quirks & peculiarities though, such as DVD-Lab Pro is not happy using .cpt form of DTS. It will import it, but if you have to recompile it will not actually muultiplex the DTS stream - even though it is listed in the "success report" it is not actually there in the VTS multiplex. You have to relink it every compile yet if .dts is used (from the DTS-Pro series encoder) all is well. Go Figure!
All Audio_TS are done in Sonic DVD-Audio Creator version 3.0 (12) on an old XP/32 system as it simply does not work on anything later. I keep meaning to try and make it work in W7 but the problem is the way XML handling has been changed by MS, and it was the very nature of DAC using the XML files that made it so stable. You never work with the assets directly, but XML files instead. The downside is that you cannot simulate a build, and must compile & burn to test. MLP encoding is done with SurCode.
 
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