I can play the Iona test burn in my Sony RDR HX900 DVD recorder. One interesting side effect of this Macintosh burn and likely and burn that didn't originate with the Sony is the DVD video cannot be dubbed or copied to the Sony's internal hard drive. I can copy and disk burned inside the Sony back to the hard drive giving me a kiosk like selection of laserdisc movies if I want those. It would work with a disk recorded inside the Sony, but doesn't work the Macintosh disks. It's as if the iDvd disks are missing something, or the Sony only copies it's version of a DVD back to the hard drive.
I hooked up the audio of the Sony to some small speakers. Listening to the soundtrack is disturbing from this Sony DVD player. There is a lot of distortion. Although the menu says it's playing a 48k audio soundtrack it seems the audio is clipped and distorted internally.
The audio seems to distort when being played from this particular disk player, but not other DVD players. I wonder if the audio will distort from my friend, John's blue ray player. An earlier burn distorted as well from my HDR 900 Sony. I'm wondering if there is some kind of setting in the Sony or flaw in the da converter or something, that is doing something like causing a 16 bit signal to be clipped through a 12 bit signal path or something. The distortion is very distracting.
I already lowered the levels of this DVD from an earlier test burn. I'm not sure how far I may have to go of if every burn will distort. It's almost like having a high volume subwoofer frequency cause the small speakers to distort, but you can't hear the bass because it's below the response curve of the speakers. I think this is related to this particular Sony players however. I may have to rip yet another version with lower output levels from iMovie.
It may be something to do with these apple iDVD burns and this particular Sony DVD player. I'm going to check the DVD-R burn against other players in the house and then try others. I'll probably send a DVD-R burn out to the Iona contact from this version as well, just because the minus R disk is more compatible.
Things I like about this disk.
The opening menu has a song as background that is from Iona's 1996 Cornerstone concert. If I would have dropped the entire audio from the earlier concert that opening menu would have rendered the entire audio of an entire set as the opening menu music. It would play once through the entire concert before repeating as long as the menu sat there. Of course the opening menu soundtrack doesn't need to be a long selection, because you can't pause it and it's not really an extra or something that is normally done. I decided to put the entire song from that earlier concert on that opening menu so another song would be on that opening menu. It's kind of like an extra, and different. If you had the disk and wondered, where is that opening song in the performance, well it's not going to be there, because that wasn't really from the 2012 performance, it's a kind of menu extra. The other chapter menus have a sound snippet from the 2012 concert.
This DVD of course has that homemade feel to it, and there are no extras. It might be nice to have a festival summary some cutaways of the fest at the end, but I don't have that video edited and I didn't take a lot of other video of the festival. Maybe I'll burn a different version much later for Iona, once I've gone through some other band edits and sent some of these other DVDs out to the respective performers.
The brightness of the DVD burn is a little bit higher than on the QuickTime master. I'm not sure why this is the case. The stage was bright, but the video looks a lot better with less encoding mpeg artifacts with the brightness turned down 15 to 30 percent on q tv or monitor when playing the DVD. You'll see less background but a more movie like experience and the quality will kind of approach that of the QuickTime master which is at 1080i.
I'm fairly pleased with the results. Now I have to run out to the net and order a real Iona DVD concert video, because I know from reviews out there that it is excellent and even has a really great surround 5,1 mix.
I almost purchased a zoom mx2 to record these concerts. The 5.1 surround recording option it had looked promising, but that's not the same as a 5.1 mix that is professionally done from a really good recording. Actually most systems, that is home based 5.1 playback systems will not be suitable for a "real 5.1 mix audio monitor" by a professional production, because there is an auto leveling function build into home for a Dolby encode. Professionals use specially certified systems. I can recall this info from a Dolby seminar given to recording engineers by Dolby. Of course one could mix a Dolby soundtrack on a hone system if they were creating something that was ONLY going to be released direct to video. Since most players would be having the same auto level summing as your home based mixing system, the other systems wouldn't show any out of balance issues. (But a film theatre would, so you need a certified system to do a correct film mix on.) If it's not going to a theatre/film release, that pro thx monitoring might be less necessary. Thx is another subject, it's basically a certification process.
Time to play a test DVD on the computers again to verify the latest burn to minus r is distortion free.
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