Directors Commentary Track - Audio question

Studio Pro 3 - G4 - 10.3.9 - QT 7.0.4 - 2gigs ram - dual 1.25's

Directors commentary track for DVD.

I'm importing the movie - and the ac3 audio into a new track - THEN I drop the ac3 file of the Directors commentary. (It shows up under the movies audio... perfect) I'm expecting to be able to control the volume of the movie track and hear the Voice Over track underneath. But I'm only alowed to play one or the other.

Where in the "help" does it talk about how to do this? I can't find it under mulitple audio tracks. (But that's what it seems I should be looking for...)

Am I way off? Any quick comments on how to do this? It seems like it should be pretty intuitive. But it's not.

Geno

It doesn't work like that. The Director's commentary is not a separate voice over track. It's a whole mix, including the voice over. So the viewer switches from the ordinary mix, to a mix that includes the commentary.
Hope this helps.



Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires - Argentina
www.adolforozenfeld.com

That makes sense. Thanks. Can you tell me where I'll find out the details in the help/tutorial? It's not under MULTIPLE AUDIO, or DIRECTORS COMMENTARY. WHat is the name of this fuunction so I can learn it?

Thanks again.

g-

There's no specific Director's commentary function. For practical purposes, you do it as if it was another audio language. Audio track 1 has the regular mix, track 2 has the director's commentary. That's it. In the manual you can look for the section about working with different audio languages.



Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires - Argentina
www.adolforozenfeld.com

Geno~

Here's what I did to get a directors audio track onto a DVD I've been authoring.

Take your entire movie and export it, so that the entire theatrical sound mix is output and combined on to one track. Then reimport it to FCP and you can then manipulate the volume level of the ENTIRE AUDIO MIX of the movie.

Lay down the directors commentary on another track in FCP. Then lower the volume of the films audio track and bring up the commentary track so the director can be heard clearly over the mix.

If there are gaps where the director is no talking, you have the option of fading up the movie's sound mix to fill the silence and fade back down again when the director begins talking again, and so on.

Then you can delete the video track, so all you have is the two audio tracks. Then export it and viola, you've got your directors commentary track with the films audio in the background.

I can help you in the area of what type of export to use, because I'm struggling with that myself. When I added the commentary track to audio 2 in my DVD, I started getting a "bitrate to high" message when I tried building the DVD, so I think I've got some research to do on how to compress that track properly to keep the bitrate down and allow the DVD to build properly. If you figure out how to do that, please let me know.

Good luck,
Noka

What you've described is exactly what I did. Works great. Ad far as exporting, you don't have to kill the video track, just EXPORT audio to AIF and use A.PACK to encode to AC3 file. A setting of 320 kbts works pretty well for me.

The Commentary Track is working flawlessly. For me it was just a matter of understanding HOW the DVD works. I assumed I needed to put in a DIFFERENT TRACK for the Directors Commentary. Figuring out it was as simple as TURNING ON or OFF an additional audio track WITHIN the main movie is what opened the door for me.

Geno