DVD Authoring Tips
Our friends over at CustomFlix wrote a tongue-in-cheek, 10-part series on how to produce a DVD (DVD Authoring) - either for your own purposes or for a replication run. Each one focuses in on a particular aspect of the process and there are insightful comments from some of the industry's top experts. Below you can get a taste for it. Click on any of the images to be taken to the sign up page and get the whole series. Enjoy, and let us know if you have questions.
Pa rt 1. "MPEG from Hell": You take a deep breath of anticipation. The DVD you've been authoring for months has just finished burning to your first-ever DVD master. You cradle the disc gently in your hands and load it into the awaiting player. And then... what's this? No -- it cannot be! Your carefully crafted cinematography has been corrupted, its beauty marred by a harsh mask of blocks, blurriness, and pixels buzzing like mosquitoes sucking the life from your work! You stagger back, clutching your head, desperate to survive this MPEG from Hell.
 Part 2. "Zombie Audio": They're here! The 2,000 DVDs you made for your biggest client have arrived. You summon your boss to the surround sound enabled conference room. The lights dim. The DVD starts to play. Silently. As in "silent movie." As in "NO AUDIO!"
Part 3. "Bits, Bytes & Bites": Your MPEG encoder is eating you alive! The first time you tried to burn a disc with the video you spent two hours encoding, your authoring program told you "Insufficient space on DVD". Determined to make your deadline, you stayed late at the office and fiddled with the encoding settings, then waited. Your second disc burned quickly, but the video looks like hell... You're on your sixth try right now, and praying you'll escape before the light of dawn.
 Part 4. "Menu Madness": It was all going so well. Your video looks great, your audio is crystal-clean... now all you've got to do is finish the menus and you're done. But somehow that's trickier than you thought. They looked great on your monitor, but when you burned a disc to try them on a real DVD player, there's this bizarre flickering that shows up. To make it even worse, the first person who grabbed the remote complained he couldn't figure out how to get the main feature to play.
But the client already signed off on the graphics, and you don't want to start over. How do you get out of this madness?
 Part 5. "Twisted Aspect": Maybe you didn't have a Hollywood budget, but that doesn't mean you're cutting corners. You shot your masterpiece in widescreen, for that wonderful broad stage. You've carefully preserved a 16:9 aspect ratio through the post-production. It looks great. Except the DVD. Something went wrong - horribly wrong - and suddenly your cast is squeezed into anorexia. What evil lurks behind this Twisted Aspect?
 Part 6. "Disc Killers": You've authored your disc and played it back on your computer several times. It looks great, so you replicated 1000 copies... but when you put one in your set-top DVD player and watched it on your TV, a cold, creeping terror washed over you. The disc is wrong, all wrong! What killed your disc??
 Part 7. "Dawn of the DVD-9": Four hours of video, and it's got to fit on a single disc. It's going to take a DVD-9 to pull off that job, but you've never done one before. You've heard horror stories of discs that freeze up halfway through. Then you realize you won't even be able to test your project on DVD-R before sending it off to the replicator, and your blood runs cold. There's got to be a way to keep this project from eating your brain.
 Part 8. "Drowning in Discs": You've finally got it: a perfect master disc. Now you need copies to sell, and a bunch for your own organization. Should you make them yourself? Duplicate? Replicate? You want the best pricing, but don't want to risk drowning in more discs than you'll need, having done the DVD Authoring single-handedly.
 Part 9. "Packaging Gremlins": The discs are ready to go to the presses. Well, almost. Now you just need to put it in some kind of case. And design the artwork. Hang on, looks like you're not out of the woods yet!
 Part 10. "The Invisible Disc": You finished your project a year ago. Boxes of DVDs showed up a month later. They've been collecting dust in the closet ever since. Have you made an invisible disc?
Brought To You By:
CustomFlix - Apple Computer - DV Creators - DV Magazine - DVDA - Like a Pro Media - Pinnacle - Sonic - Magnet Media - Total Training - Ulead
|
