The Made in Secret DVD Saga

In the spirit of collaborative problem-solving, here is a summary of what we’ve tried so far. I’ll be adding more in-depth write-ups for each item, for anyone interested in learning from our experience or sharing the wisdom of their own.

Trashing Build Files and Rebuilding
The very first thing I tried was trashing the build files and re-building. No luck.

Moving the Layer Break
A lot of folks on user forums suggested that the source of the problem might be the location of the layer break. Accordingly, I re-assigned it to another location, but it didn’t help.

Outputting to Different File Formats
Originally, we used the DDP 2.1 format to output the data files, since that was the format the mastering house recommended. When that failed, we tried DDP 2.0 and CMF, but neither helped.

Extracting Data from Playable Disk
When I first sent the DDP files, I included a playable copy of the movie that I’d burned on my home computer, just for their reference. Ironically, that disk plays fine. After a couple unsuccessful attempts at using the DDP files, the mastering house said that they might be able to extract the information from the playable disk and create the master from that. A number of people said that this is a bad idea, but out of sheer desperation, I told them to give it a try. It didn’t work, (but for an entirely different reason). More on that soon.

Putting DDP Files in Root Directory
Someone suggested that the problem was that we didn’t have the DDP files in the root directory of the disk. (Instead, we had them in the Layer0/Layer1 folder generated by DVD Studio Pro.) We sent them a new set with the files in the root directory, but had the same problem.

Calling Technical Support
We’ve worked our way up the food chain of every technical support center in the DVD kingdom–Studio Pro, Eclipse, etc–until they all said we’d stumped them. We’ve also received a lot of helpful suggestions from various online user forums. We chased down every lead, but still no joy.

Using Different Media
The guy at Eclipse suggested that something might be out of spec on the DVD-R itself. I sent them a set burned on a different brand, but had the same problem.

Transferring Files onto Server
Since the error messages seem to point to some confusion about the type of media the files are on, I asked the mastering house to try moving the DDP files from the disks to their harddrive and then run Eclipse using those. They did, but got the same errors.

Sending to a Different Mastering House
I’ve been reluctant to do this because the mastering house has been working with us to figure out the problem. Now, though, it seems like we’ve run out of things to try, so I asked our replicator if we could try sending the next set of disks (the seventh) to a different mastering house, just to see what would happen. Unfortunately, they didn’t know of any other mastering houses that do dual-layer DVDs. I’ll have to look into it more.

Outputting to DLT
We haven’t actually tried this one yet, but we’ve been working on it. A lot of people seem confident that our problem would be solved if we simply output the data to a DLT tape instead of a DVD-R, but I think there’s a good chance that we’d end up paying $300-400 for the dump and still have the same problem. After all, we already tried moving the files off the disks and onto a server, so I don’t see how the problem could be the disks themselves. Data files are data files, whether they’re on a disk or a tape. My thinking is: If we’re going to spend to $400 we don’t have to get it dumped to DLT, we might as well spend $600 we don’t have and get it dumped by someone who can troubleshoot it at the same time. That’s what we’re working on now.