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What do I need to put my video on a DVD?
You need to add 4 things to your computer:
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Once I have the needed hardware, how do I go about making my DVD?
There are 4 steps involved:
Then you need to use your editing software to edit your video and add titles and or special FX. Some advanced editing solutions will allow you to set the chapter points for your DVD menus on the timeline. Others will allow you to pull thumbnail images from your video for use on buttons and menus.
The next step is to encode the videos into MPEG2 format for DVD burning and authoring. The compression used for DVD video is called MPEG2. Some NLE applications have encoding software built in that will allow you to export your MPEG2 files. Some editing software will allow you to export MPEG2 files directly from the timeline, others will require you take an added step and convert your .avi or Quicktime files into MPEG2. Your authoring software may be able to do this encoding for you. New NLE technology is becoming available that will allow you to edit using DVD ready MPEG2 compressed files, eliminating the encoding step altogether.
The last step is to import you video clips and graphics into the authoring software and then create the necessary menus and buttons, then link them to the video clips. Once you have created your DVD on your hard drive, you can use the authoring software or a separate burning utility to actually write the data onto the blank DVD.
Will my DVDs look as good as the ones I can buy or rent?
It is important to understand that Hollywood uses very sophisticated, multi-pass encoders to ensure that their DVDs look great. They may spend days working on a single segment, making sure that it looks spectacular. While your DVDs will not look as great as Hollywoods (Let's face it, your video doesn't either), you will be able to make DVDs that look quite impressive. Without much tweaking your DVDs will look much better than VHS or SVHS footage. With a little effort you should be able to produce MPEG2 video that looks almost as good as the original DV footage. The quality of your video is determined by the amount of compression you use, regardless of what DVD recording format you use.
What kind of compression should I use?
As I said earlier you want to use a compression that supports 720x486. This can be a Quicktime or .avi file using a DV compression, or straight to MPEG2. The advantage of going straight to MPEG2 is that you don't need to transcode for your DVD authoring. You can find affordable external USB2 MPEG2 encoders for around $200. While these devices will save you time, the disadvantage is that they usually come with editing software that is quite limited. These devices are good if you're just looking to do archiving with very little editing.
For projects that require editing, we recommend capturing in DV (via FireWire) and then encoding to MPEG2. For best results take a look at our real-time capture cards. The real-time productivity means you get more time to spend on doing your authoring. For a complete list of our Video Capture cards that include DVD authoring software and the ability to produce DVD ready video files, check out our MPEG2 products page.
As we mentioned earlier, new technology is becoming available that will allow you to capture directly into MPEG2 via FireWire and then edit these files. This is important because the new HDV high definition video standard is based on MPEG2 compression. For more information about HDV, check out HDVideoguys.com
How much video can I get on a DVD?
Current DVD recording technology uses single sided / single layer disks with a 4.7GB capacity. At standard DVD video quality level that works out to about 2 hours of video with audio. If you use more compression you get even more time, but your video quality will drop a bit.
While we are on the subject of storage capacity, you may not realize this, but making a 2hr DVD is going to require a very large amount of disk space. Here is a little math exercise that will explain just how much storage you will be needing.
How long does it take to burn a DVD?
The new 16x DVD burners will burn a complete 4.7GB DVD in about 8 minutes!!! A 4x drive would require 15 minutes.
What about all the various DVD recording formats?
If you find the alphabet soup of formats confusing, you are not alone. It is difficult to understand. This is why we have dedicated an entire page in our DVD Cookbook to explaining the various formats. Follow this link to the DVD format page in the DVD Cookbook. The good news is that almost every drive on the market is multi-format. Make sure the drive you get supports both R and +R burning.
The most important thing for you to understand is that all of the various competing camps have the same goal: To become the new industry standard. The way they will accomplish this is by making sure the disks you make using their burners play in as many home DVD players as possible. We feel we can say with a high degree of certainty that the disks you make today will work in just about every DVD player currently on the market. So the only issues will be with older legacy DVD players.
We feel that the DVD-R format has emerged as the best format for you to distribute the DVDs you produce. From our experience and independent tests run by various publications DVD-R disks will be the most compatible and reliable. The latest DVD-R drives now support 16x burn speeds and the disks are the most compatible with the widest range of home DVD players. In general write once (R/+R) disks will be more compatible then re-writable (-RW/+RW) DVDs that you burn. New Dual or Double Layer disks are hitting the market. These disks will hold up to 8.5GB of data. Dual Layer disks you create will play in almost any new DVD burner, but they are not always backward compatible with older players. DL technology is very new, as it matures we are confident DL disks will become as compatible as re-writable disks are today.
The race for the winning recordable format is over and it looks like it was a draw. The new race is on for larger capacity formats that will allow you to burn high definition DVDs. These will utilize new Blue laser technology. These HD disks will most likely not be backward compatible. You will need to have a new high definition DVD player and TV to watch them. This technology is still a couple of ears away.
Will my home made DVDs play on every home DVD player?
Using the DVD-R/+R format your DVDs should play on almost every current DVD player available. The same is true for the +R formats. Some players still have problems properly reading re-writable (-RW/+RW) disks. With older DVD players, you may run into some playback issues with some formats while other formats will work fine. This backwards compatibility with older DVD players is a problem that will resolve itself over time as these players get replaced by newer models. We are confident that if you were to take a DVD-R disk you created today to your local electronics superstore, it would play on over 90% of the DVD players there
I already own a DV editing system. What else do I need besides a DVD burner?
You need a couple of things. The first is some kind of authoring software; the second is a encoder to turn the DV footage into MPEG2. One of the reasons we like Sonic DVDit! 5 and Ulead DVD Workshop authoring software is because they include very good MPEG2 encoders. Canopus ProCoder and Discreet Cleaner are professional level MPEG2 encoders that encode very quickly and will give you excellent quality MPEG2 video files. There are also a couple of downloadable encoders that you can experiment with. These may give you better and/ or faster results. Click on the links below to learn more and download demo version.
I already own a DV capture card , what DVD Authoring software do you suggest?
Many of our capture cards now come with authoring software. Some of these titles are very basic. We feel that if you are going to invest the time and effort and money into a top notch digital video editing system, then you want to make sure the DVDs you produce are just as good. That means you want to have multiple menus, buttons and chapter points for interactivity. You'll also want to be able to import your own graphics for backgrounds. These are just a few of the features you can find in software like Sonic DVDit! 5 or Ulead DVD Workshop. For more info on authoring software check out the DVD Authoring page of the DVD Cookbook.
Great, now which DVD burner should I buy?
This is an excellent question and it really depends upon three factors:
I really want to get started making my own DVDs, but I don't want to waste a lot of time & money burning bad DVDs. What advice can you give me?
We call the bad DVDs 'Coasters and even at a buck each, the cost of 'coasters' can add up. Each section of the DVD Cookbook includes tips & tricks for making the best possible DVDs.
We do offer this very important advice for you to follow the first couple of times you make a DVD.
DVDit! and DVD Workshop will allow you to create the DVD image in a folder on your hard drive. What this gives you is an exact version of the DVD, but not on DVD media. Play and test your DVD from the hard drive on your computer screen. Test each button and menu option. Make sure they go to the right clips and that each clip goes to the proper menu or new clip when it is done playing. Watch the video carefully. If you see any artifacts, tears or other signs of poor video quality go back and encode those clips into MPEG2 again. Listen to your audio and make sure it sounds clear.
Once you are sure that your DVD is the way you like it, burn it onto a rewritable disk. Now you can test your project directly from disk, either in your computer or your set top player. If you run into any problems with the video quality the first thing you may want to do is try a different burning software to take the data from the folder to the DVD media. Your DVD burner most likely came with this software. If that doesn't get the job done you may want to try encoding those segments again, possibly using different settings.
When you can burn a rewritable DVD that works 100% you can then go on and produce your single use DVDs. If I am going to be making more than a few copies, I like to do it directly from the folder, using the DVD burning software.
This process may seem like a lot of extra work, but it is worth it at first. Once you have become more experienced you will know all the right settings for your particular system. At that point you'll be able to skip these extra steps and just burn directly from the authoring software on the first try.
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