Multiplexing "Muxing" error?

Thanks for the reply. No, this audio is what came along with the YouTube videos when I downloaded them and dropped them into Final Cut (I'm a teacher and we sometimes find useful YouTube videos about history).

But I did export the project's video to Sound Studio because some parts of it were so quiet that they were hard to hear. So I extracted those parts from the exported audio, amplified them in Sound Studio, and then took them back into the Final Cut project in AIFF form, which is what Final Cut seems to like.

Maybe doing that messed up the muultiplexing, you think?

Tom

Yes, that's what I'm doing: File - Save as Disk Image.

I've tried that three times now, using different iDVD themes to see if it made any difference. Then I went back into the Final Cut project and added the ending .aiff to my amplified audio to see if that was the problem, and exported it as a QT movie to iDVD, but iDVD failed again with the same error.

Unless someone can think of something else to try, I guess I'll have to go back into the Final Cut project and throw out my amplified audio and put the original (too-quiet) audio back on, and try that. Maybe there's some way to amplify audio within Final Cut itself that I don't know about.

Tom

It was already saved in .aiff form; that's all that this version of Sound Studio works with.

When I exported the too-quiet video from Final Cut out to Sound Studio I used File - Export -Audio to AIFF. Sound Studio then took this aiff file and amplified it, and then I dropped it back into Final Cut. So it never was anything but aiff from start to finish.

Now, I don't know what form the audio originally was in YouTube. I download them as mp4 files, drop them into Final Cut, and then Final Cut has to render them into a form it can work with. I always assumed that it converted the audio to .aiff, but maybe it's something else. I'm not expert enough with Final Cut to ask it what form the audio is in, in the video project. Do you know, or know how to tell?

Maybe that's it. Maybe I should not be exporting the audio as .aiff and then bringing it back in the same way.

I do know that some of the music and sound effects that I bring in from Soundtrack are in .aiff form, and I drop those all over the project's audio tracks, and they always work fine.

Thanks. If by original file you mean the project before I doctored the audio, then I'll have to put the original audio back before I can try to make a disk image of it. That will take a bit of time. I'll report back after I restore the original YouTube audio and try to make a disk image of the project that way.

Tom

Thanks again F. Shippey. I do appreciate your taking the time to try to help me out with this.

OK, so I'll drop one of these YouTube videos (I strung six of them together to make this history video for my class, so I may have to test each one of them that way) straight into iDVD to see if it can digest it into a disk image.

The thing is, though, that these videos are in mp4 form when downloaded from YouTube, which may not be the form that Final Cut uses them in, so it might not be the same thing--it may be apples and oranges (mp4 from YouTube vs something else when exported out of Final Cut as a QT movie).

After I drop these videos into Final Cut and hit "Render" (which I have to do because FC won't even play them until it renders them), FC may turn into something other than mp4, for all I know. I don't know what FC is doing when it "renders." I'm not savvy enough with video editing to understand it.

I'm like the guy who can drive a car (i.e. edit videos in Final Cut) but if the engine quits or runs rough, I can't even raise the hood because I don't know how things work under there. All I can do is push the pedals inside the car. I need a real mechanic!

Thanks again,

Tom

Well, I tried a quick experiment--I just opened up the Final Cut project and deleted the soundtracks that I had sent out to Sound Studio, amplified the volume, and brought back in.

After those soundtracks were eliminated, I exported the project from FC as a QT movie again and dropped it into iDVD and told iDVD to make me a disk image---and it did it, just fine.

Therefore, the trouble was my amplified sound files. Mystery solved. It was a sound problem.

Anyway, as for using YouTube mp4 videos in Final Cut, I've done it many times before and this is the first problem I've had. As you say, the quality of the video is sometimes terrible with artifacts and pixellization, but these are really just throwaway videos that I show in our history class and then junk. The narration is often more important than the pictures, and the whole idea is just to give the students some appreciation of certain aspects of history. We follow up each video with class discussions.

Now I've just got to figure out how to raise the volume of YouTube videos that are too quiet to hear in Final Cut, even with the audio level line raised to the max in the timeline. Final Cut is so full of features, only a fraction of which I use, that I wouldn't be surprised if there's some filter hidden in the program's menus somewhere that could raise the volume the same way Sound Studio does it. One thing is sure now, I can't use Sound Studio to do it, or iDVD chokes.

Thanks again for all the help.

Tom