DVD Authoring Part
1 by
Bob Hudson
Or How to
Burn a DVD Without Getting Burned
Confused about DVD authoring and how to easily burn a DVD of your favorite home videos or client videos? The hardware and software for DVD authoring and DVD burning can now be purchased for as little as a few hundred dollars, but in some respects the process of successfull DVD burning can seem as mysterious as it did in 2000 when a low-end DVD authoring system would have added perhaps $20,000 to the price of your computer.
No matter how much you spend for a DVD authoring system, though, the basics are the same:
- Acquire and edit your source video
- Put the video and audio in the required formats for DVD
- "Author" the video and audio into the required structure for a DVD, including menus, chapters and other bells and whistles, and
- Burn the authored project to DVD or send the completed project to a DVD duplicator or replicator
LAST THINGS FIRST - BURNING A DVD
Let's talk about that last step first. "DVD burning" gets its name from the laser beam used to etch the data into a chemical layer on a recordable DVD. "DVD burning" also describes what some people feel like doing to the pile of unusable DVD-R's they accumulated while trying to learn DVD authoring and production. Hopefully we can save you from some of their mistakes.
After completing the DVD authoring process, most of us will burn DVD's on a DVD recorder installed in our computer or connected to the computer by Firewire or USB. This process differs significantly from the way they produce those DVD's of our favorite movies that we rent or buy. Those DVD's are "replicated" and the data is actually stamped into the DVD's during a complicated manufacturing process. However, the same chemical burning process used by our desktop DVD burners is also used by some companies that will make mass copies of your DVD project: instead of replicating them with the stamping process, they duplicate them in machines that can burn several copies at once. The difference between burning - or duplication - and replication can be critical.
Burned/duplicated DVD's are produced on recordable DVD's including DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R and DVD+RW. The "R" stands for "recordable." "RW" DVD's are re-writable so you can erase them and record on them again. The plus and minus signs indicate the two primary formats of recordable DVD's. There has been a lot of debate about which is best, but the few impartial tests of each format seem to indicate that there really is not a lot of difference between DVD-R and DVD+R. The big difference is between DVD recordables and the replicated - stamped - DVD's. In this article we'll use "DVD-R" to represent all types of DVD recordables.
Replicated disks are pretty much 100% compatible with all DVD players. DVD-R's, meanwhile, are at best compatible with something like 80-90% of players. That means if you want to author and distribute a DVD that will play on any player, it has to be replicated. But, replication can be quite expensive unless you need hundreds of copies. Later on in this article we'll discuss ways to make your burned DVD's as compatible as possible.
A couple more quick items regarding DVD recordables:
The DVD burners we use with our computers are designed only for DVD-R for General disks. There is also something called DVD-R for Authoring disks but almost no one uses them, even though they have a much better compatibility rate than DVD-R General disks. The disks themselves are generally much more expensive, and there is only one burner on the market which supports them - the Pioneer DVR-S201 which costs about $4,300.00 the last time I checked. You may also encounter DVD-RAM, a type of disk designed for recording data much the same as a floppy disk does. It has been used in some standalone DVD recorders (which function much like a VCR) but it is not compatible with the DVD-Video specification that governs the types of DVD's we use to watch movies on conventional DVD players.
When you buy a box of DVD-R disks it will say "4.7GB" (gigabytes) capacity. Now try to fit 4.7GB of computer files on one of them. You can't do it. DVD's, as with hard drives, have their advertised sizes computed in the decimal system, while your computer counts in the binary system. Thus a 4.7GB DVD will hold only 4.37GB of computer data.
PLAN FOR DVD BEFORE YOU SHOOT
Which brings us to the first of the basics of DVD authoring we outlined above: acquiring and editing your source video.
If you are going to author a DVD project you really want to start planning for it even before you shoot or edit your video, if for no other reason than the limits imposed by the 4.37GB of storage space on DVD's.
4.37GB DVD's are called DVD-5 and it is said their capacity was determined by Hollywood's desire to be able to fit a 135 minute movie on a single disk (at the time that covered 99% of movies). Today most Hollywood movies are no longer distributed on DVD-5 disks, but instead are on dual layer DVD-9 disks which can hold almost twice as much data, but which have to be replicated - you cannot burn a DVD-9 (a dual layer DVD+R that can be burned was pending at the time this article was written but it will likely require a new generation of DVD burners and revised DVD authoring software). There are DVD disks that can be burned on both sides, but that means very long projects would have to be divided into two parts and users have to flip the DVD to the other side when one side finishes playing.
The question then might be, "So a DVD-R or +R can hold two hours and 15 minutes of video, right?" Yes and no. You can put three hours or even four hours of video on a 4.37GB disk, but realistically it can be very hard to get good quality with just two hours of video and some DVD authoring and encoding software can barely produce a one hour DVD with acceptable quality. Whether you are shooting and producing a new video, such as a wedding, or editing together a bunch of short home movies into one project, it's a good idea to have a target of perhaps 90 minutes of video for a DVD authoring project, unless you have a high quality MPEG encoder, and even then you might want to think about how many people will actually sit through a long production (unless you are one heck of an editor and story teller).
During editing you also want to keep in mind that certain kinds of video can be much harder to encode to MPEG, such as fast motion, fancy transitions and title effects and noisy low light video. Surprisingly, one of the hardest things to encode are simple fades to and from black.
A popular use of DVD is to archive those old analog tapes, such as VHS and Hi8 tapes, by using a DV camcorder or analog-to-DV converter box to import them into the computer before editing and encoding to MPEG-2. That analog video can look much better if you connect a video processing amplifier (proc amp) and/or timebase corrector (TBC) between the analog source and the DV converter. Some imperfections in the analog tape will be reduced or eliminated and, if needed, you can adjust the color and brightness so your DVD's may end up actually looking better than the source tapes. (For more information on authoring analog-to-DVD projects, click here: Convert VHS to DVD Article ). This is a four part article and you can continue reading by going on to DVD Authoring Part 2.
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Read the DVD and DV Black Level article to learn why a proc amp is essential for burning good DVDs
© 2002 by Sign Video Ltd.
