Road To Independence Viewing Guide & Technical Help

UPDATED Mandeville, LA – UPDATED WITH WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER INSTRUCTIONS! If you have purchased the “Road to Independence-Director’s Edition”congratulations! You are the proud owner of the world’s only effort toever tell the story of the Founding fathers’ struggle for IndependenceAND you are also the owner of the world’s first ever, full length,INDEPENDENT animated film. Here is some technical information that willgreatly enhance your viewing listening experience of this meticulouslycrafted original film.

ATTENTION RTI-DIRECTOR’S EDITION OWNERS WITH “MY DVD HAS NO SOUND” issues. Your RTI-DVD set was manufactured to the highest quality specs available for DVD including the Disc 1 Soundtrack. This “Surround” soundtrack was mixed and then encoded using the DTS system and your RTI-DE Disc 1 is set to default to DTS. Surround Sound receivers built before 2005 may not have the DTS codec installed and therefore cannot read the soundtrack file, thus the “I have no sound!!!!” problem, this is EASILY addressed because the disc is encoded with an alternate soundtrack of Dolby 2.0 (all dvd players translate this to normal stereo -L/R- output). You can select the Dolby 2.0 track 1 of 2 ways:

1. In the DVD’s main menus, select “Audio Setup” Then In the Audio Setup: Select “Dolby Stereo 2.0” or

2. While the DVD is playing Press the “Audio” button on your DVD’s remote control and select “Audio English 2: or “Audio English 2 Dolby 2.0”

We apologize for the confusion this has caused with customers using older hardware or software configurations. We tested the disc on all our iMacs, MacBooks and Power Macs as well as DVD and Blu-Ray players at Founding Father Films and the Apple DVD player AUTOMATICALLY selected the Dolby option in all our tests.

FOR WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER

The “Audio Setup” menu may not function properly when selecting “Dolby 2.0”, NO PROBLEM, the fix is quite easy.

1. Click The Play Movie on the RTI-Director’s Edition  Main Menu

2. Once the movie starts playing click the “Pause” button to pause the movie

3. In the WIndows Media Player menu at the bottom of the screen, click the ARROW next to the “DVD” to reveal the options menu (see illustration), then select “Audio” then select “Options” Then Select the BOTTOM MOST Audio Track-“English 2.0”. Your disc is now ready to be enjoyed with highest quality stereo sound.

(click for sharper images)

You can also switch the audio track using this keyboard command method:

In many DVD and Bluray software players, you can easily access bar menu or a context menu that allows you to switch the default audio track, but this is not present by default in Windows Media Player 11.  The ability to switch between tracks is there, but not accessible by default.

Unfortunately switching audio tracks is one of those features buried in the new interface.  You have to bring up the classic menu like so:

Press Ctrl + M to view the default menu (you can also right-click to the right or left of the audio controls, but show menu bar does not show in Now Playing mode.)
Click on Play, then Audio and language tracks
Select the audio track you would like to play
Press Ctrl + M to remove the menu
If you cant see your movie, then press Ctrl + 3 (same as clicking View and Now Playing).

Video

This DVD is 16×9 aspect ratio.  Which means, for most of you, if youhave an HDTV it will fill up the entire screen on your normal settings.The picture shouldn’t looked “stretched” or “squeezed” or have blackbars on top or bottom.  This is a standard definition disc, most DVD and Blu-Ray players will automatically up-convert it for your HDTV if it is connected with an HDMI cable.  If you have an older 4×3 or “tube” TV,you can watch it the preferred way in letterboxed format (with blackbars at the top and bottom) or you can set your DVD Player to zoom in and crop thesides to fill up your screen (you will lose some of the picture this way and it is not preferable).

If you are viewing on a Samsung flat panel or other flat panel that has Picture or viewing modes, make certain to turn OFF any “dynamic” or “enhanced” modes and watch the film in either “natural” or “cinema” modes. The reason is that this animated film is constructed in such a way that dynamic settings distort the depth of field and  remove the nuances of color corrections and balance added to almost every scene in the film.

Audio

UPDATED 02 January, 2012 – This film was recorded in many different places and the audio engineers have worked exhaustively to ensure conformity between audio parts. For this reason we recommend that the audio selection of choice is DTS Surround playback. The film will play ON ANY DVD PLAYER EVER MADE but you MAY have to use the films DVD-built-in-Audio Menu to select the proper track.

-IF YOU INSERT THE DISC AND HEAR AUDIO DURING THE SETUP MENU BUT NO AUDIO DURING THE FILM. This is simple, either use your DVD player remote control and press the “Audio” button to select the Dolby 2.0 track OR navigate back to the RTI Main Menu, select “Audio Options” and then select Dolby 2.0, then play the film. This changes the default audio output to “Dolby” which every DVD player ever made has.

-This film’s soundtrack was meticulously remixed in a classic surround sound environment according to specifications given by DTS. The diagram below shows the recommended setup for your DTS listening enjoyment. This setup was the setup used to render the RTI surround sound track and will therefore yield an audio experience as close to the audio engineers design as is possible.

-You can learn more about DTS recommended Surround Sound setup here and by watching their tutorial video.

DTS and the DTS logo are copyright 2010 by DTS

TheKingDude

Host of the Mike Church Show on The Veritas Radio Network's CRUSADE Channel & Founder of the Veritas Radio Network. Formerly, of Sirius/XM's Patriot channel 125. The show began in March of 2003 exclusively on Sirius and remains "the longest running radio talk show in satellite radio history".

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