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Making DVDs
(updated March 2003)

Herewith a big Tips page to pass on my experience of making DVDs to order. You may indeed decide to buy the necessary kit to make DVDs yourself (typically an MPEG capture card and Pioneer burner) - good luck to you and I hope the following helps you out!

As a bare minimum, make sure your PC runs Windows 98 or later, has an Intel processor of more than 700MHz, has over 128MB of RAM and over 14GB of free hard disk space. Anything less and you'll be struggling - I guarantee it! And this is all with an MPEG-2 hardware encoding card doing most of the 'work' - if you go down the DV route, you'll need many tens of gigabytes free and tens of hours of computer processor time to 'render' your video footage back into MPEG-2, ready for DVD.

And so to the tips, in approximate order of you needing their content(!) They're categorised under
Preparation - Capture - DVD authoring - Testing - Final thoughts

Preparation

  1. Despite what DVD-Rs say on their sleeve, you only get 4.4GB of formatted capacity - this is your limit when working out what footage and what bitrate to record. In fact, it's usually best to aim for about 4.2GB, to give yourself some margin for error - there's nothing worse, after 3 hours of computer processing, for things to grind to a halt because the DVD image won't quite fit on the disc! Remember that your DVD authoring package is usually only estimating the final file sizes involved.
  2. Clear hard disk space before starting (14GB or so needed if your build approaches DVD-R's limit of 4.4GB) and defragment.
  3. Do a clean boot so that Windows has as little 'loaded' as possible, and then disable/close down all virus checkers, firewalls, resource meters, PDA link utilities and the like. The less that's running the better - trust me - you don't want to be dropping any frames or running into problems due to the processor being too tied up with other applications.
  4. Disable all screensavers and power-saving options while recording or DVD burning. The last thing you want is a screensaver to cut in or a hard disk to power down!
  5. If capturing from a video recorder, double-check the tracking setting for the tape being captured - make sure picture quality is optimised. And don't forget to wet-clean your video recorder's playback heads regularly.

Capture

  1. Your video footage in the digital domain Capture from your capture card in MPEG2, at 2 to 8Mbits/s, depending on quality needed, action in the clip and space available/capacity required. 2Mbits/s - OK for stuff with little going on, pixellates horribly when something happens or when using low quality original footage. 4Mbits/s - good results, pixellation effects not obvious, but blurring on fast action. 6Mbit/s - excellent, almost perfect. 'Proper' commercial DVDs tend to use 8Mbits/s and upwards. Note the tradeoff in disk capacity - at 8Mbit/s, you'll only fit just over an hour's worth on each DVD-R. Note also the 'bandwidth' requirements inside your computer at higher bit rates - at 6Mbit/s, your hard disk is having to receive and store almost a Megabyte every second - this doesn't sound too bad, but consider that it has to keep up, with no glitches or slight interruptions whatsoever throughout a long presentation.
  2. If capturing (perhaps from camcorder) into MPEG files that will be edited/stitched later on and re-encoded into a more polished whole, make sure to use as high a bit rate as possible at the capture stage. You can always drop the bit rate for the final burnable MPEG files, but you can't up it. And re-encoding low bit rate files at a similar low bit rate produces horrible flickering and other artefacts...
  3. Check the audio side of your video source before capture. If it's stereo, then make sure you use a stereo VCR and check the capture card/software recognises the feed as stereo as well. Obviously, this is especially important for music clips. Don't forget to set the audio levels properly - it's very easy to overlook this step and end up with a perfect video picture and a distorted or over-quiet soundtrack!
  4. Remember to use the same pixel resolution for all clips on the DVD. Note that a video resolution of 704 by 576 is OK. Leave at that resolution if forced to by your capture card, despite the more usual DVD requirement for 720 by 576.
  5. Disable on-screen preview while recording (if possible), using timings and presets and audio to end the recording. Running a preview is often a fairly processor-intensive task and will increase the risk of dropped frames and glitches in the megabyte per second stream of data that you're trying to write to your hard disk.
  6. If there are serious glitches in the source video (e.g. where a camcorder has been stopped and then restarted, or between TV programmes), you may find that these translate to synchronization issues in the final, DVD-authored VOB files. Where you know about dropouts and glitches, factor them into your captures by doing several short captures rather than one long one.
  7. Remember to sample some audio/pictures as you go, for use in the DVD menus.
  8. Remember that any separate audio clips need to be sampled at 48kHz, not the 44kHz (CD) standard.

DVD authoring

  1. For authoring DVDs, steer clear of the budget Sonic MyDVD (a.k.a.DVDit!) software - it's VERY picky about MPEG streams and formats and is fond of crashing two hours into a build with something helpful, such as 'Unknown error -1'. In addition, it insists on using uncompressed audio on the final disc, meaning you can fit 30% or so less video footage per disc. Much more robust, powerful and efficient (if a lot less freeform) is Ulead's DVDMovieFactory. Even better if you can afford it is Ulead's DVD Workshop, with which I've had very good results when using good quality captured video streams.
  2. When authoring your DVD (and only if your authoring package gives you a choice) don't use buttons/text near the screen edges, they won't be seen on a TV, which cuts off around 10% all round from the full computer video image. Luckily, this also means it cuts off the irritating 'head switching noise', often seen flickering away at the bottom of video footage. Use dark buttons/text wherever possible, so that DVD player highlighting doesn't confuse the user with white buttons glowing white, etc. 8-)
  3. Don't forget to put in 'Back' or 'Home' buttons, where applicable - never force the user to eject the DVD and reinsert it just to get back to the title menu!
  4. Remember to allow plenty of computer time for the conversion process. Even after all your material is assembled, it will still take at least 3 hours of computer processor/hard disk time to encode (on a Celeron 700MHz PC), image-write and burn two hours of footage onto a DVD-R.
  5. It's generally OK to buy low-cost (£1 a disc now, from 121cdr) 'general' DVD-Rs - you don't need to worry about 'authoring' discs, which are designed for adding region encoding and protection systems. Go for the cheapest branded media - the very cheap unbranded ones often have problems on their outer edges. No need to pay top dollar though - aim for about £1 a Disc.
  6. Be prepared to split longer (over 1 hour) movies into smaller chunks if appropriate or necessary. This has two benefits: (i) any audio synch errors that have been creeping in (heaven forbid) won't carry forward into the next section (ii) if one segment has a problem or glitch (for whatever reason), you only have to capture that section again rather than the whole thing. Although the movies will appear separately on the DVD menu, you can set them to automatically follow each other - all the viewer will notice is a pause of a second or so.
  7. Before burning to a DVD-R disc, blow on it gently to remove dust and also clean it radially (if necessary) with an appropriate disc-wipe.

Testing

  1. Encode test VOBs check them thoroughly on the computer first. Although you may not e able to view a DVD's navigation features using just the raw VOB file(s), you can at least skip through to their end (in WinDVD or PowerDVD), to check smoothness and that audio/video synchronization is maintained properly.
  2. If you spot problems in the encoded footage at any stage, double-check the problem isn't the playback means instead of in the MPEG encoding itself. Many is the time I've thought my capture system at fault when it turned out to be problems with the playback software and hardware.
    If you do spot a problem, double-check that it also shows up when the footage is played using a different DVD application/viewer before assuming the worst. In particular steer clear of Microsoft Media Player, which often shows up video streams as far worse than they really are...

Final thoughts

  1. For optimum compatibility with both computer DVD drives and set top players, make sure you use your DVD authoring software to do the disc-writing. Tempting though it is to burn your test VOBs and folder straight onto a DVD-R with generic CD/DVD data writing software, the DVD specification is quite particular about the order and placement of files and folders and discs burnt by hand seem to play on fewer players than those burnt by authoring software such as DVD Workshop.
  2. Make sure you keep your capture/authoring/burning software patched right up to date - check the developer web sites for updates. The DVD authoring world is still maturing and important compatibility fixes are being rolled in regularly.
  3. Your video footage in the digital domainNever throw away your source material (VHS/camcorder/AVIs/whatever), or even your captured MPG files - no matter how well you make a DVD, there will always be something that you think could be done better when you have the time. And one day you will...