Hey!
I downloaded a DVD recently (The Police live in Rio 2007), and the quality is excellent...
But I need to turn the volume all the way up to make it sound "normal" (not even loud!), and the audio and the video are very slightly out of synch. The audio is a bit early - you hear cymbals, and THEN you see the drummer banging them, you hear the last word in a line, but you still see the singer's lips moving for a second or so, and so on...
Are these two small problems easy to solve?
Thanks in advance!
Raf
Depends on your definition of easy :) The good news is you can basically solve both at the same time, but it requires some work.
Sync problems can be totally confusing. You go too far either way and you're still out of sync. Probably best to try out a small section first until you get it right and make note of how much you have to add or subtract from the audio track.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I think for these problems you'll need to extract the audio to work on it alone and then re-encode. I assume it's Dolby Digital. If you have the right software I guess you can extract and work on the actual AC3 track. Increase the volume and experiment with the sync by adding or subtracting some silence at the beginning. Otherwise extract it to a wav file and do the same thing, then re-encode it back... I dunno, it's a pain in the ass to be honest.
Good luck.
Thanks, sounds easy. Maybe it'll take some time and some headache, but it doesn't involve anything too complicated that I can't understand. :P
I imagined that to solve the sync problems I'd have to add or subtract something either to the audio or to the video...
Well, is there any free software you recommend? The stuff I have here only extracts as WAV, and I'm not sure if I have the tools to reencode it to Dolby (there would be some quality loss in the process as well, right?).
Audio is Dolby Digital 2.0 @ 192kbps
Yeah if you leave it as a wav (PCM) then it's gonna take up a bunch of space, but you won't lose audio quality that way. You can re-encode to MPEG sound which has bitrates to choose from just like Dolby, and nearly any program supports that.
Hmm, the software.. grr
Okay, here's what I would do.. just extract it to a wav, and rip a bit of the video (from the start until a certain point) to play around with getting the sync right. I always just use DVD Shrink for that, it's easy to get DVD files to a certain length with it. Make a small version of the wav too, to match.. and you can keep altering this wav until you get the sync right, then make note of exactly how much time (like usually just milliseconds or frames if you can) you added or subtracted..
You know, I suck at explaining things. I'm much better at just doing them.
I would use TMPGEnc DVD Author.. now, I never can find the latest version + the latest version registration codes or whatever, so I just have an old version, but somehow get that and then you can figure out how to import the files and try out making a short clip and re-encode the audio if you want.. if you get the sync right, then do the same thing with the full length files.. and amplify the wav first too..
Maybe someone else will explain a better way ;)
Yeah, I got TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6.
You explained everything quite well, thanks!
The only thing that wasn't clear to me was... If I extract the audio to WAV, and afterwards reencode it to Dolby, won't the quality loss be too big?
Oh my god, don't use TMPGEnc ! It's the biggest shit I've ever seen. For some reason it ALWAYS re-encodes the video track.
Please get WOmble if you can ! It allows you to edit mpeg files without re-encoding.
Also beSweet is a great tool for audio manipulation, and it's free
pittrek wrote: Oh my god, don't use TMPGEnc ! It's the biggest shit I've ever seen. For some reason it ALWAYS re-encodes the video track.
Please get WOmble if you can ! It allows you to edit mpeg files without re-encoding.
Also beSweet is a great tool for audio manipulation, and it's free
That's strange. NOT re-encoding the video is one of the reasons I love TMPGEnc. It's so fast and easy. There are 3 TMPGEnc programs I'm familiar with.. the Author, the MPEG Editor which doesn't re-encode either, and the classic TMPGEnc Plus, which does.
Admittedly I'm small-time and unfamiliar with a lot of software, but I started out with NeroVision and got sick of the constant new glitches with every new version, and the constant re-encoding even when totally unnecessary so when I tried the TMPGEnc Author it was such a refreshing change.
Raf: Yes, if you re-compress the audio it's gonna lose quality.. you can either accept that and at least do it at a higher rate (256 or 320 maybe) to help out, or if you can afford the space, keep it as PCM and you won't lose any quality beyond what it already lost with Dolby. The drawback is of course it may not fit a single layer DVD anymore.
@pittrek: Do those programs also edit the audio without reencoding it?
@Jeff: Thanks! If pittrek's programs can't help me escape from having to reencode the audio, I'll do a higher bitrate. :)