DVD Authoring
Part 3 by Bob Hudson
Or
How to Burn a DVD Without Getting Burned
Continued from DVD Authoring Part 2
DVD AUTHORING SOFTWARE
You've produced clean source video and audio and properly encoded it (if your authoring program accepts pre-encoded video), now how do you get it on disk ready to pop into a DVD player?
That's where the DVD authoring software comes in. In its simplest form DVD authoring could involve importing an MPEG-2 movie and its audio file into the DVD authoring program and then setting the options so that as soon as someone pops the DVD into a player, that one movie starts playing - no menu, no chapters, nothing but the movie.
Usually though, we want a menu with at least one button for the viewer to click. Menus can have still or moving images in the background, even sound. Not all DVD authoring programs have every option and not all of them allow you to customize the look of the menu. With some DVD authoring software you may be limited to certain design templates while others give you have free reign to import your own backgrounds and create cheesy buttons if you so desire. The more advanced DVD authoring software lets you create some rather complex navigation schemes for having users move about through your DVD. Again, keep the viewer in mind: in this era of technology overload, most folks are happy to just be able to figure out which button to click to play the movie.
Some advanced DVD authoring options have more utility, such as adding additional soundtracks in other languages or closed captioning. Multi-angles can have some interesting uses: you could shoot the same event with two or more cameras and at the click of a button, the viewer could switch between the different viewpoints while watching the DVD.
Of more use perhaps is "chapters." Chapters are basically markers within a movie and each chapter can have a button so a viewer can instantly jump to a point within a movie without having to fast forward or rewind. This can be handy with, for example, wedding videos where a viewer might want to skip over the ceremony and jump straight to that point in the reception where Uncle Louie dances a torrid tango with Aunt Tillie.
DVD authoring can take 20 minutes or several days, but no matter how simple or complex the project, before burning it to disk all the elements, including video files, audio tracks, menu and button graphics and the instructions on how it is to be played, have to be assembled into a rather strict file structure required for video DVD's. Some programs call it "compiling," others call it the "build," and some just do it when you click a button that says "Burn DVD."
It can take quite a while and during this stage you may get an error message if you did something wrong in an earlier stage. For instance, the DVD Video specifications say that the maximum combined bitrate for audio and video must be 9.8Mbps or less. Well, if you encoded your video at 8.5Mbps and used PCM audio (which is over 1.5Mbps) you will be over the limit and during compiling your DVD authoring software may stop and tell you that the data rate is too high. Or you may have encoded two hours of video at 7Mbps and the total files for your DVD project exceed the 4.37GB capacity of the DVD so the program stops compiling and gives an error message about that.
At the end of the compiling stage your authoring software will have created two new files, folders actually, called "VIDEO_TS" and "AUDIO_TS." Again, depending upon your software, you may have an option to not only burn a disk but to also save these folders to your hard drive, or to just save the folders but not burn them to disk. The "VIDEO_TS" folder contains all of the compiled files, while the "AUDIO_TS" folder is empty (we won't get into that). If the DVD player on your computer allows it, you can select the "VIDEO_TS" folder from your hard drive and play it exactly as you would a burned DVD. If everything looks and works as it should, you can then burn the two folders to DVD, either using your authoring program or some disk utility programs which, while they may not be able to author DVD's, will burn the "VIDEO_TS" and "AUDIO_TS" folders to DVD in the proper manner (if you want several copies of the DVD, this can be the best way to do it).
A warning here about hard drive space: have lots of it. If you encode video and audio files and associated menus and buttons that will fill up most of a DVD that means you will need about 4.37GB of disk space for those. Then you will need another 4.37GB for the compiled files, so plan on setting aside close to 10GB of hard drive space for each DVD project you author. You can always reclaim much or all of it after you've burned and tested your DVD and found everything to be okay.
When buying DVD authoring
software make sure it will have all of the features you deem essential,
whether it's chapters, Dolby Digital audio encoding, the ability to accept
MPEG2 files encoded by other software, the ability to create custom menus
with background images of your choice, etc. Again, some DVD authoring
software will only allow you to use the menu choices that come with the
software and some will only let you use the MPEG encoder included with
the software. 
Read more of this article in DVD Authoring Part 4
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