DVD Authoring
Part 4 by Bob Hudson
Or
How to Burn a DVD Without Getting Burned
Continued from DVD Authoring Part 3
DVD-R PLAYBACK PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS
Have you spent many hours encoding video, using DVD authoring software, burning the project to DVD-R and then when play your disk it has glitches such as blocky video, audio out of sync, pauses and freezes?
If you know that the video looked good after being encoded but before being burned to disk, then chances are the above symptoms all relate to the pitfalls of DVD-R and DVD+R (this also include RW disks and we'll just lump all of these under the name DVD-R). These kinds of problems show up when a player has a problem with a DVD-R. It's the compatibility issue we discussed earlier in Part 1.
Some players, usually older ones, will have problems no matter what you do and some just will not even load a DVD-R. But to improve compatibility there are a few basic steps to follow.
The first is to keep your video bitrate below 7Mbps. Then, if at all possible, use compressed audio. Many DVD-R playback problems can be solved just by using compressed audio instead of uncompressed PCM audio.
Use "name brand" recordable DVD's: some brands just work better than others. Maxell, TDK, MAM-A (formerly Mitsui) and Verbatim have done well in published tests and generally get good reports from users. Some cheaper DVD's may work well on your personal player or for data storage or backup, but don't count on them for DVD's you produce for clients or sell to others. After all the hard work you did producing a video and authoring a DVD, it's not worth trying to save a buck or two on a blank DVD-R if it increases the chances someone may not be able to play it.
Burn your DVD's at slower speeds - the theory is that you get a cleaner burn and better data integrity at slower speeds. I still use 1X for all of my DVD's and many experienced DVD producers say that even burning at 2X greatly increases the chances that your DVD-R will have compatibility problems. Those 4X DVD's you see in the store - burn them at 1X.
Do not use paper labels. They work fine on CD's but not DVD's. For a professional look there are now lots of printers that will print directly to DVD's.
I also use re-writable DVD-RW's lot. Well, actually I have just one DVD-RW but is has been erased and re-used dozens of times. I had to buy a DVD player than would handle DVD-RW disks, but the savings in not having to use one-time only DVD-R's for everything has more than paid for the player. When starting out in DVD authoring it is inevitable that you will burn disks which, for various reasons, will not work. Get a DVD-RW so you don't see dollar signs floating away every time you burn a disk that is usable only as a coaster. DVD-RW is also handy to use for testing and experimenting.
Practice, practice, experiment
Video compression and DVD authoring is a bit of art and science and I encourage you to do a lot of experimenting. I often run across pleas for help that say something to the effect of, "I just bought X Brand DVD authoring software yesterday and promised a client I'd have a two-hour DVD project ready in three days, but the video looks terrible, I can't fit it all on one disk and my menu buttons go to the wrong places!"
Your first lesson should be to find out how well your MPEG encoder works (or doesn't). Create a three to five minute test movie with lots of different types of video (including fast motion, fades to black and cross-dissolves) and encode that at several different bitrates and, if your encoder has them, with various option quality settings. Then burn that to disk and watch it on a few different DVD players including the one on your computer. Since the disk will also require a menu as well as buttons to click between the different versions of the movie, this is also a good way to learn the basics of creating a DVD navigation scheme.
Unless you plan to use only the menu templates and canned artwork included with many DVD authoring programs, you'll also want to practice creating the graphics for DVD menus. You'll find that designs and colors that look great on a computer screen look lousy on a television. Skinny lines, narrow fonts, vivid colors and gradients should be avoided. Also be aware that there are issues of image size and resolution that must be considered when designing DVD menus. For instance, if you create a DVD menu in a graphics program, you typically would create it at 720x534, 72dpi. After it's finished you would then re-size it to 720x480 and save that as the file you use for your menu. Because of differences in the "aspect ratio" of pixels, this process ensures that your menu (or other still image, such as a photograph) will not be distorted. If you had, for example, a perfect circle in your design and you did not use this process, the circle would look like an oval in your DVD menu. Some graphics programs and some DVD authoring programs now have shortcuts for streamlining this process.
If you really don't need fancy menus nor do you want to spend a lot of time waiting for your computer to encode, compile and burn DVD's, then maybe you should consider the standalone DVD recorders that work like a VCR. You can edit your movie, save it back to tape, plug the tape deck or camcorder into the DVD recorder, press a couple of buttons, and have it turn out a DVD-R in realtime. You can do chapters on these, record from your DV camcorder's Firewire connection for better quality, and the hardware encoders in some of these DVD recorders are quite decent. You don't have as much control over the look and layout of the DVD as would using authoring software, but it's the simplest and fastest way to burn videos to DVD-R. There are also now some hybrid hardware/software solutions for your computer that work in a similar manner: plug your tape source into the hardware and it gets encoded and burned to disk on your computer's DVD burner in realtime.
(As an aside here, you can also use standalone DVD recorders and mix them with VCRs to simultaneously mass duplicate DVD's and VHS tapes. All you have to do is to hook them all up with some relatively inexpensive video duplication gear.)
Before purchasing any DVD authoring and encoding software, or hardware DVD recorders, search out the various DVD user forums on the Internet to find out how the products you're considering are actually performing in the real world. There are a lot "reviews" that are really nothing more than re-writes of manufacturer's press releases and they only tell you what a product is supposed to do, not how it really performs. Again, look for the real world user reports.
One last thought: when you visit the online DVD forums you will read a lot of reports from people who said something went wrong and they have "burned a lot of coasters." Well, truth be told, faulty DVD's make lousy coasters. They have that big hole in the middle so the condensation from your drink ends up making a ring on the table.
Now if someone would just start marketing a cork hole plug...
Article copyright © 2004 by Bob Hudson
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© 2004 by Sign Video Ltd.
