Hi Nick,
I know this is a frustrating situation to be in. I've been there myself so I feel your pain. As for your burner, that's a good one so you're ok there. As for software, I've had no problems doing what I needed to do using Nero 10. It's loaded with everything from back-ups to making movies and creating customized CD's and DVD's. It's never let me down and I've been a Nero user since version 6.
As for your video editing software, though it may be a bit pricey and has a slight learning curve, you can't go wrong with Sony Vegas. It's pretty much a high end program, but more "high end for serious consumers" than being "high end for the pros". As for creating DVD's, I have had no problems with Win DVD maker. It's been flawless for me and I do quite a bit of video work using it.
The thing you mention about missing tracks etc...this could be a lot of things. Some CD players and DVD players can't read the newer stuff of today. In some cases, it can even be the media you use. For example, I have an old TV here that has a DVD player in it. One of the first ones that ever came out. It will not play the DVD's I create correctly and sometimes, it won't play them at all or it will stop in the middle...or give me some sort of "loading" message to where it never plays. If I put the DVD in my entertainment center or on my pc, it plays fine. Weird thing here...my father has one of those old TV's too with the DVD built in. My stuff plays perfectly on his and it's older than mine....go figure!
As for CDR's...again, same thing man. I have a 2001 Corvette. It has a pretty killer Bose system in it. There have been times when certain CDR's I have burned come up as "disc error" when I try to play them in that system. I change my media, and it works. You would think I'd be ok with a system that came out in 2001...but with the way media is today as well as how things may have changed in how it writes, it's going to be pretty common to get these errors from time to time in certain systems. So though I can feel your frustration having been through it myself, unfortunately that's just the way it is.
Heck I can throw you one better. I had a client send me a 2 hour show that needed the audio to be sync'd up and mastered. I also had to fly in a few special effects in the video portion and have a pop up come up that showed the name of each song in the show as they performed it. I had this killer video all done, audio sounding fantastic...it's just the way I want it. I export it and then play it on a DVD player. Everything is killer....I'm loving everything about it. It gets to one part of the video where the name of the song comes up, and the video of the band does not. The music plays and sounds great...but no vid of the band!!! What the heck?! I go back to my master files and look at that section, it's perfect.
So I go to export again thinking maybe there was a glitch somewhere. Go through it all again (rendering time on a 2 hour video takes some time, lemme tell ya lol) and the same thing happens. For the life of me, I can't figure out why this is happening and it's driving me nuts! For some odd reason, the master files work...but this doesn't. How could this be?! Well, I go back into the master files and look at where I might have done some editing. Vegas works a lot like Sonar as far as slip editing...so all I had to do was slide out what I edited in that section. I slide it out and just export that part of the video so I don't have to wait 4 hours. It plays and I can see it now! So, I go back into the project....slide out where I edited so the bad stuff is there again, then I re-save it with a different file name. I edit out the stuff again, export and I'm fine.
So, something must have been corrupt with the file or something when I edited it and bringing it back to itself and resaving must have fixed it. I still really don't know..but it worked. Talk about frustrating?! Thank God I wasn't late delivering this to the client....but, it shows proof that even with decent software, you can still experience these little Gremlins from time to time. I've never had anything like this happen before and I've done literally hundreds of videos. Sometimes, it's just your turn for an anomaly to take place. Anyway...hope some of this helps. Best of luck to you.
-Danny
post edited by Danny Danzi - 2012/01/27 13:37:17