LIVE NIRVANA GUIDE TO DVDS: PRODUCTION
In this section, Jim Hirte talks us through some of the problems he has encountered while producing individual NIRVANA DVDRs and how he solved them. We are grateful to Jim for taking the time to explain everything for us.
02/12/90
"Pretty straight forward capture. I think this one was the quickest to date. After added the clipping (to remove VCR Head noise) and some other secret sauce it was done in I think 5 hours. Not bad. Audio was mastered fairly quickly and encoded to AC3 using softcode. Other than it being pretty dark at times, this is a really good show."
02/16/90
"First low gen of this I've seen (from Kris). Very nice, and a vast improvement to my previous copy. Another easy capture/edit. Audio mastering was almost as easy as 2/12/90, simple eq, etc ..."
02/19/90
"This is by far better than my previous copy which is of unknown gen, and unwatchable. Great show. Easy capture/edit. Audio was fairly simple. no big surprises."
04/17/91
"Nice to see this in as low as a gen (would kill for the master, or one of the other cam shots ... seriously!). This was easy to edit, but holy fuck is it grainy. This presented a problem, as grainy video can leave those nasty looking video artifacts (macro blocks). I was able to keep them under control with some noise reduction (which basically consists of a slight blur) and upping the bitrate to I belive 9mbs on this one. Audio was horrific. Way to much noise in it. I got a ton of it out without introducing artifacts in the sound, and it sounds a crap load better than the original/un-mastered audio."
03/20/90
This was the first show that Jim transferred.
"2 of the 4 songs had major sync pulse problems, giving incorrect field order randomly throughout the entire song(s). 'School' and Floyd were completely fine after reversing the field order. 'Big Cheese' was the biggest pain. I believe the problem was with the equipment that was used to create the final resulting video. All those tapes Kurt had used for the background stuff was probably done on low quality tapes and EP mode. I really doubt that when they were added to the video they went thru a TBC, which would have helped out. Either way, this track was a pain. Random field order issues needed to be corrected in order for it to look decent upon playback. What I did was went frame by frame and reversed the field order where I needed to. Now to do this in Premiere (any version) you have to splice out the offending frame(s), and then set the proper field order. As you can imagine, this took quite a while to do. Once the field order was corrected, I output the track to another (new) AVI file, and used it for the final product. 'Lithium' was pretty bad, but not as hacked up as 'Big Cheese' had gotten.
"Certain sections of it got pretty bad as fas as field order goes, and I used the same process to correct it as I did with 'Big Cheese'. Once all tracks were corrected field order wise, I created a new project in Premiere and added all the tracks to the timeline, where I exported audio for mastering, and then exported video to create the final M2V video file. For this one I used Ligo's LSX MPEG2 plugin for Premiere, using a bitrate of 9mbs CBR (constant bitrate).
"After audio was mastered, it was encoded to AC-3 format using oftCode, and were then authored to DVDR."
11/04/93
"This was a pretty straight forward capture using my DC30 Pro (one of the last ones I used this card for). Editing was very easy, just added some fades on the beginning and end of the show. For video encoding I again used the LSX plugin for Premiere. Since I wanted to keep the bitrate fairly high for quality reasons, this show was split to 2 discs. I believe I used a bitrate of 8mbps CBR, and cut the show for disc 1 after an hour. the remaining part of the show would be disc2 using the same parameters as disc 1.
"Audio exported from the timeline, mastered in CEP, encoded to AC-3 using SoftCode."
11/09/93
"This was the last show I used the DC30 Pro to capture. Again, a straight forward capture, no issues, etc. Video encoded using LSX @ 6mbps VBR during testing. I wanted to try putting this show on one disc, not two like I had done with 11/04/93. I figured 6mbs VBR (variable bitrate) would still give pretty decent quality, and the show would barely fit onto the disc. After much experimentation, I ended up encoding this particular show using my DC1000's hardware MPEG2 encoder, again using 6mbps, but using CBR. It was a tight fit onto one disc, but quality is still very good.
"Audio exported from timeline, mastered in CEP, encoded using SoftCode."
01/10/92
"First show I captured using the DC1000, and my TBC. Captured at 25mbps. Perfect capture IMO. Was edited and exported in under 5 hours. Exported using 8bmps VBR (all hardware encoding). Audio exported from the timeline, mastered in CEP, encoded using SoftCode."
"All DVDs thus far have been authored using Spruce Up. I plan on using another authoring program at some point here, but need to figure a few things out with them first. I would like to create a different menu layout and include a track selection menu, but haven't had the chance to get to in depth with the program I want to use (DVD Motion). Track selection currently is like an audio cd, you can jump from one track (song) to the next by hitting the button on your player. With Spruce Up, a track selection menu will work, although there are some issues with it currently, which have not been resolved (which is why there is no track selection menu on my discs)."