Making Professional DVD from Authoring to Replication Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................................... 3 ................................................................................................................ 3 1.0 Introduction ........................................................................................ 3 1.1 Some Basic DVD Concepts ................................................................................ 4 1.1.1 How many kinds of DVDs are there? ........................................................................... 4 1.1.2 Are DVDs all the same around the world? ........................................................................................................................................ 6 1.1.3 What do I need to know as the DVD author? ................................................................................................... 6 2.0 The Workflow ..................................................................................................................................... 6 2.1 Video Capturing (Video Transfer) .................................................................................................................................. 7 2.2 Video Editing .................................................................................................................................. 7 2.3 Video Encoding ................................................................................................................................... 7 2.4 DVD Authoring ............................................................................................................................... 8 2.5 DVD Mastering .................................................................................................................................... 8 3.0 The Roads to Rome .................................................................................................................................... 13 3.1 Free Solutions ......................................................................................................... 24 3.1.1 Example: ...................................................................................................................... 25 3.1.2 Quicker and Easier Ways ........................................................................................... 29 3.1.3 Adding Sub-titles ......................................................................................................................... 31 3.2 Medium Priced Commercial Products .................................................................................................... 32 3.3 Advanced Solutions .................................................................................. 32 4.0 Common DVD Authoring Mistakes ........................................................................................... 32 4.1 Not enough space between IFOs and BUPs. 4.2 Try to create a copy protected DVD-R ................................................................... 33 ........................................................................................................... 33 4.3 Didn't test playability on enough number of players ....................................................................................................................... 34 4.4 Use cheap DVD-R as master ............................................................................. 34 4.5 Mis-handling of DVD .............................................................................. 34 4.6 Didn't enable verify when burning the DVD-R ......................................................... 35 4.7 Send only one master copy to your replicator ..................................................................................................... 35 4.8 Did not include a PCM or AC-3 audio track for NTSC video ....................................................................................................................... 36 4.9 Set a bad layer break for DVD-9 ....................................................................................................................... 36 4.10. Broken menu links .................................. 36 4.11. Menu text cropped ......................................................................................................... 37 4.12 Hard code drive letter for enhanced DVD, i.e. DVD with video and data ........................................................................................................................ 37 4.13 Audio and video out of sync .......................................................................................................... 37 4.14 Subtitle out of sync ....................................................................... 38 5.0 DVD Replication & Duplication A CD and DVD Replication Limerick ............................................................................................ 39 5.1 How to choose DVD replication service provider? ................................................................................................................................................ 39 ............................................................................................................................................ 40 6.0 Glossary 7.0 References 1.0 Introduction Making DVD is both a science and an art. With the ever decreasinDge pllrices on powerful PCs and peripherals, you and I can create great DVDs that used to require big investment on hardware and software just few years ago. Now a $400 PC from or other PC manufacturers will be good enough to create somewhat professional DVDs. In this article I will try to provide you with the basic information to get you started on creating DVDs. All you need is just some basic equipment such as a digital camcorder, an IEEE 1394 controller card or a video capture card. There are lots of other tutorials and HowTos on the web on making DVDs. What distinguishes ours from the others is that we try to cover as much as we can, so novices or pros, prudent or extravagant readers, Windows fans, die-hard Mac users, or Linux supporters can benefit from reading this. In this article we not only tell you how, but in most cases also tell you why. As in life there are always trade-offs. If you have tons of money to burn you can get yourself the state-of-the-art system to add great features to your DVDs. But if you like the challenge of experimenting free software, you can be equally satisfied by creating wonderful DVDs without spending a dime on software. But many of you will be in the middle-way category, i.e. spend some but not too much and still get the job done beautifully. Both the free and advanced approaches require steep learning curves and strong technical background. You will find some "DVD for Dummies" kind of approaches in the middle. I have made no assumption on your technical ability so it's your own decision to choose and read the right sections of this article. The Table of Contents is your best pointer to the appropriate sections. Do study the Workflow, DVD Mastering, and the DVD Replication & Duplication sections though. 1.1 Some Basic DVD Concepts As you don't need to know combustion engine to drive a car, you don't really need to know how DVD works in order to make great DVDs. Nevertheless, some basic concepts about D1V.1D.1 w Hillo hwel pm. Laent'ys kprionvdidse o sfu DchV cDosn caerpets t ihne froerm? of Q&A. Depends how you see it, there are DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, and DVD-Audio. Each of these DVDs can be in DVD-5, DVD-9, DVD-10, and DVD-18 formats. The first classification is based on functions and the second classification is based on the capacity or playtime. The names of the DVDs are pretty self-explanatory. DVD-Video is for video, DVD-ROM is for pure data, DVD-Audio is for high quality audio, and DVD-R is the recordable version of all these DVDs. There is also DVD+R which is nothing more than a different kind of recordable DVD. The new DVD writers do not care whether the recordable media is in + or - format. The following table summarizes the different formats of DVDs. Side / Video Format Capacity Comment Layer Playtime Single / DVD-5 4.7 GB 2 hours The most basic kind of DVD Single Need to be careful during authoring to choose Single / DVD-9 8.54 GB 4 hours the correct jumping point from Layer-0 to Double Layer-1. Essentially a DVD-5 on each side. The disc needs Double / to be manually flipped in order to play the other DVD-10 9.4 GB 4.5 hours Single side. No artwork can be printed because both sides contain data. Essentially a DVD-9 on each side. The disc needs Double / to be manually flipped in order to play the other DVD-18 17.1 GB 8 hours Double side. No artwork can be printed because both sides contain data. DVD Demystified Since this article is about authoring video DVD so we will leave the discussion of other functional DVD formats to other people. Jim Taylor's is like the Bible of D1V.1D.2 a nAdr we iDll VbeD as gaolol dt hpela scea mto elo aorko inutno.d the world? Physically they are. It's the content that makes the difference. This is all because of the different video system used by different regions of the world. In the US the video format is NTSC and in Europe it is PAL or SECAM. NTSC has 30 frames per second and the line density is 720x480 for DVD. PAL has 25 frames per second and the line resolution is 720x576. These resolutions are for normal TV size. For wide screen TV the resolution will be different. A PAL/SECAM DVD normally won't play on an NTSC regions unless the player has the dual- format feature. Most cheap DVD players do come with this feature. On the other hand, an NTSC DVD will normally play in PAL regions; not because they don't care but the popularity of dual-format players in those regions. To be safe, you should make your DVD in the c1o.1rr.e3c tW fohrmata dt foo rI tnhee etadr gtoet ekdn roewgi oanss ttho ea sDsuVrDe 1a0u0t%h ovrie?w ership. DVD is a feature-rich gadget for the years to come. It has more interactive features than the old VHS tapes. As the author of DVDs you should at least know about the following features unless all you care is just a plain video played from the beginning to the end. Features of DVD include: • Menu Menus are like the table of contents for a DVD. On the remote controls of most DVD players there is a Menu button. Pressing the Menu button will bring the screen to a menu on which viewers can choose randomly to jump to specific part of the movie. In it's simplest form a menu can be no more than just few text labels. But it can also get fancy by adding a small movie as the button animation background. When you • aSuutbhtoitrl eyour DVD you will need to set break points on the video to mark them for chaptering. Subtitles are like the Closed Captions (CC) on TV and they can be turn on or off if your DVD player supports this. The most common application of subtitles is to create different language subtitles for foreign viewers. For instance if the main movie is in English and you want French or Spanish viewers to understand the plot, you can add subtitles in French and Spanish. Besides texts, subtitles can be images too and gaming DVDs sometimes do take advantagSeu obft tihtlies. WCroeraktisnhgo spubtitles can be • tAimudei oco Tnrsaucmkisng task. But with the right tool it will be a pretty straightforward process. We will talk about a free subtitle tool call later. Just like the subtitles audio tracks can be turned on or off if a DVD player supports this feature. With the remote control, you can imagine yourself going to a concert where you can be the conductor to turn the violin on and make the cello silent. Audio tracks can accomplish this effect so individual track can be turned on or off and the overall sound is the resultant of all tracks that are turned on superimposed together. The obvious application of audio track is again for foreign viewer to watch • tChaem meorvai eA nwgitlehs f oreign language voiced over. Combined with subtitles, you can have many language combinations, say, French subtitle with Chinese voice over. Camera Angles can be considered as having few movies played simultaneously and the viewers can only pick one movie at a time. With this in mind, you can actually design a DVD to play two totally different scenes and has nothing to do with the camera angles. The original concept of camera angles is to look at a movie setting from different angles. I rarely see any DVDs make use of this feature and was told this can only be found in some promiscuous movies. The real estate people should • pCuotp tyh Pisr foetaetcutrieo nto work for them when trying to make a virtual tour for their potential buyers. Copy protection can only be added during the authoring step. Once a DVD is authored and mastered there will be no way to add copy protection. Common copy protection schemes are CSS and Macrovision. These are usually added at the last stage of the authoring before transferring the result of the authoring to DLT tapes. There is no copy protected DVD-R because DVD burners cannot write copy protection information onto a DVD-R. If you need copy protection on your final pressed DVDs, you will need to output your masters to DLT tapes instead of DVD-R. No all DVD authoring software can add copy protections. If a software can output the result to DLT tapes normally it will also have copy protection enabling feature. In any cases you should consult the User's Guide on how to enable copy protection. We will talk about this on few popular DVD authoring software programs. 2.0 The Workflow As in cooking, making DVD is a step-by-step process. By and large, we can divide the process into these following activities. 2.1 Video Capturing (Video Transfer) DVD is all about video (although this is not true; there is audio DVD and data DVD as explained above) and video comes from different sources. In order to create DVD on computer you will need to somehow convert the video source into computer video files for later editing. Common way of getting video into the computer is by IEEE 1394 Firewire. Most video camcorders now have a Firewire output. If you have the older camcorder then you will need to have a hardware capture card plugged into your computer. As the power of PCs is getting more powerful capture cards are becoming less popular. In either case just follow the User's Guides that come with the device to transfer your video into digital file. A video capture software should be run on the computer to receive the video stream from the video source device. The user interfaces of the software differ among different pieces of software. The format for the captured video can be different too. It can be either AVI or Mpeg-2 and each format has its pros and cons. AVI is the raw video format with gigantic file size. A 10-minute video in AVI format can eat up 2GB of disk space easily. Being an un- compressed format, AVI preserves the video quality. If you have a powerful computer with a lot of disk space, AVI will probably be the best bet. Mpeg-2 is the native format for DVD and it is a compressed format, meaning the file size will be much smaller and the video is re-constructed based on a very complex mathematical algorithm. Since our ultimate goal is making DVD so capturing in Mpeg-2 format makes a lot of sense. The disadvantages of capture in Mpeg-2 format are: i) if you have a slow computer the CPU may not be fast enough to process and compress an individual frame which in turn causes drop frames; ii) you will have no control over how many passes need to compress the file into Mpeg-2. The quality of the video will improve if the compression software scans the video more than one time to determine the optimal streaming rates. But with real time Mpeg-2 capturing this is pretty impossible. Normally if the video does not have fast moving scenes then one pass should be ok. 2.2 Video Editing Once captured, video has to be trimmed, re-arranged, cropped, and beautified by added effects such as transitions. Video editing can be the critical part of your project. Good or bad, the result of the editing dictates whether the DVD is professional or amateurish; outstanding or mediocre. There is an array of video edit software, ranging from totally free to couple of thousands dollars. We will discuss them thoroughly in the following sections. There is an analogy between word processing and video editing. In word processing we are dealing with paragraphs and in video editing we are dealing with video clips. Let say you are writing a long essay such as this. Once the essay is written you will need to refine it rhetorically by doing some editing. So you will probably move paragraphs around, splitting a long paragraph into two or even three. The same applies to video editing. You might have a long scene that you want to divide, some bad scenes you might want to get rid of, and you might want to re-arrange the scenes in different chronological order. 2.3 Video Encoding There won't be the need for encoding if there is only one video format. But in the video world there are many formats, namely AVI, MPG-1, MPG-2, DivX, MOV, WMV, etc. Encoding is essentially a transformation from one format to the other. An analogy will be for human language. A thought of "Thank you!" in English has to be translated to "Danker" in German so the recipient will understand. In the case of DVD, an AVI file has to be converted into MPG-2 format in order for the DVD player to understand. The software or hardware device usually associated with encoding is "Codec." Codec stands for Coding and Decoding and there are many examples in the real world that require these processes. Translation among different human languages is one example. In covert operation, a message may need to be encoded in a special way so only the intended recipient can read it. When the recipient receives the message he or she has to decode it. The rule governing the encode and decode process is called an algorithm. Another good example is the ubiquitous WinZip program. By zipping a file we are encoding it to another format and by unzipping it we are recovering (or decoding) its original content. The encoding used for DVD is called Mpeg-2. Mpeg-2 not only converts the video but also compresses it and this allows a 4.7GB DVD-5 to hold video up to 2 hours. The DVD player (either the set-top unit or the software in a computer) will decode the Mpeg-2 stream and convert it back to video signal suitable to be viewed on the screen. It's a misnomer to call some software as a codec if they only do encoding without decoding or vice versa. So it's more appropriate to call some of them as encoder or decoder instead of codec. A codec should do both encoding and decoding. 2.4 DVD Authoring Let say you have all the asset elements (i.e. video, audio, menu background, subtitles) ready, it's time to combine them together into an integrated DVD. Again, there are a lot of software products that can accomplish this goal. We will describe them in the follow sections. 2.5 DVD Mastering The result of your authoring needs to be transfer to physical media such as DVD-Rs or DLT tapes for testing or for sending out for replication. At this stage you will need to consider issues such as copy proteNctEioRnO and region limitation. If your DVD does not have menus, you will need to consider DVD specifications compliance which is ignored even by famous DVD writing software such as . 3.0 The Roads to Rome Capture Referring to the above diagram and let's recap the workflow we have discussed earlier. The sequence of activities is: We (or transfer) Ethdei tviindgeo from the tapes on aE cdaimticnogrder into an AVI files on a computer. The captured AVI files may have lots of scenes and some of tEhnecmo dmeady be useless so we need to go through the toA ucltehaonr iitn ugp. Out of we gAeutt ah ogoriondg A, VI file but it's not the format to be stored as a DVD. So the AVI Afiluet whoilrl ibneg into Mpeg-2 file making it ready to be used by the step. During Mastering menus, subtitles, and/or audio tracks are added. The result of needs to be put on a physical medium such as DVD-R or DLT tapes and this is the job at the stage. This is only an overview picture. There are still subtle intricacies that need to be dealt with at each stage. For example, out of encoding most software products require you to separate the video and audio streams as .m2v file and .ac3 files. These issues will be addressed later in the discussion. 3.1 Free Solutions There are a lot of great DVD Authoring software products selling at very reasonable prices. So using free software should not be financially motivated. To me experimenting free software products is a good learning process. By going through each stage of the workflow with a dedicated software, you gselti dthee r iunlseight on why things are done in certain way. Eventually when you use commercial software you will appreciate the nature of work more. Just like if you know how to use using a electronic calculator will be a piece of cake. Thanks to open source and unselfish programmers, there are many solutions here and each one of them is totally free. You can create you own suites of software by choosing a tool from each category of the workflow. When you move along the workflow the new tool chosen for the current activity should be independent to the tool chosen in last stage. For example, you can choose Windows Movie Maker or WinDV as your capturing tool and your editing tool should perform just well n Wo minaDttVe r( Cwahpitcuhr tionogl) yo uV ihratvuea luDsuedb d(Eudriintgin cga)pturing. LQiustEendc b &el BoweS awree etht e( Eanvcaoildabinleg )tooDlsV foDrA euatchho srtGaguei o(Af tuhteh woroirnkgf)lowI.m FogrB tuhren s (aMkea sotfe ring) disceuxsasmiopnl,e we will choose the path of > > > > as aFno r Capturi.n g • AMCap • AVCutty I couldn't get it to work. Try DVApp developed by the same author. Not very intuitive at the beginning, but very fast and efficient trimming tool once • yCoaup tguert euFsleudx to the user interface. It has optical/digital scene detection and other functions for working with your videos. • DVApp The preview function doesn't seem to be working. • PSTreOttIyK s Cimapptlue rcearpturing tool allows Type 1 and Type 2 AVI file capturing with or without preview. • PVrirettutya slDtaubbleM aondd easy to use tool. It doesn't have the options to choose between Type 1 and Type 2 AVI as it always capture as Type 1. • TWhionuAgVhI a V widoenod Cerafputl utoreol for editing, it's not very straightforward for capturing. Too many settings. • UWsiendd toow bse Ma oshvaiere Mwaakree rand it's FREE now. It can capture video as AVI, WMV, RealMedia, Mpeg1, Mpeg2, Non-StdVCD, VCD, SVCD, DVD, and miniDVD. • WinDV (XP only) Only captures Type 1 AVI. Very simple and small capturing utility allows Type 1 and Type 2 AVI capturing. But For Ediitt idnogesn't have the VCR like control buttons to control the camera. • AVCu tty Not very intuitive at the beginning, but very fast and efficient trimming tool once you get used to the user interface. It has optical/digital scene detection and other functions for working with your videos. • AVE Visual Editor AVE Visual Editor enables user without any programming experience to use the • pAoVwIDeer mofu AxviSynth. With AVE Visual Editor you simply connect icons with lines and when graph is complete watch the output. • VAiVdIeEod eitditor and encoder. It can edit, encode, requantize MPEG and AVI including DivX. Very much like VirtualDub, but can also encode to VCD/SVCD/DVD mpg. AVIedit allows you to join and split avi files, extract frames and do whatever you want. You can capture video by number of ways, including one-frame-per-minute (web camera) option, workaround annoying 2 Gb file size limit, send your videos to printer, heavy compress it and post to your webpage. You can change framerate, duration, frame size, color depth of your videos and other properties, even without • rAevciodm Fprreees sDioVn and without loss of video quality. AVIedit allows you to convert avi clips to bmp and bmp to avi, animated GIFs etc. (Windows XP only) Perfect for students, DV camera owners, video enthusiasts or anyone exploring video editing - Avid Free DV software is an easy, free way to join the Avid family and • tAevsitT-drriicvkes t Chlea isnsdicustry-standard editing interface used by more professionals than any other video editing solution. AviTricks is a non-linear, non-destructive AVI video editor with real-time preview. The tree-structure and sub-project approach allow for an unlimited combination of filters and overlays, while rubber-band timeline adjustment gives a smooth blending of video and audio properties to produce a professional result in either AVI or • AWVinSdEodwits Media Format. It includes a wide range of adjustable effects that can be used separately or in combination. • TMpegE nc Official editor for avisynth. Requires .net framework 1.1. One of the best MPEG video encoders, convert to MPEG2 (SVCD, DVD) and MPEG1(VCD) with several settings and filters. Freeware MPEG1(VCD) encoding. • AVlisrotu baalsDicu jboMinOinDg, splitting, demultiplexing and multiplexing features. MPEG2 encoder expires in 30 days. VirtualDubMod is a unification of several popular modifications of the famous video • eWdAitXing software VirtualDub. Unification of three projects, VirtualDubMPeg2, VirtualDubOGM, VirtualDubAVS and more. Wax is a high performance and flexible video composing and special effects software. • TWhien iddoewa sfo Mr Wovaixe iMs taok beer very general purpose and flexible in video composing and effects, so that you can compose your dream video sequence with ease every time. (XP only) Windows Movie Maker 2.1 makes home movies amazingly fun. With Movie Maker 2.1, you can create, edit, and share your home movies right on your computer. Build your movie with a few simple drag-and-drops. Delete bad shots and include only the