steven_mullins

Chris P., Rick and others,
So, I've authored a bizillion DVDs for various purposes but am working on my first real mass distributed DVD today.

So much has changed over the past few years with encoding and the set-top players themselves. I have a few questions. I'm using DVD Studio Pro and am working with a combination of action-based traditional animation done in Flash along with some DVCam-shot live stuff. Anyway, most of the footage has come to me as BlackMagic encoded QTs.

What would you recommend as settings for the MPEG encoding, that wouldn't push your average 8-year-old's parent's DVD player too hard? Are there some standards out there that are current?

Thanks,

steven

chris_poisson

Hey Steven,

I usually keep the average bit rate down to 5 or less. But if there's a lot of motion you may need more. best thing is to do some tests and see how they play.

Hi,

I am planning to create a DVD that have pictures slide show + movie clips can be played in any regular DVD player.

What do i need to pay attention on?
Composition Size?
File Size?
File format?

And, which software do you advice for burning the movie to a 4G DVD disc?

thanks
sk

raymond wiggins

I've found that not all DVD authoring programs, especially the low end consumer ones, don't always put out a truly compliant file to the DVD spec.

If you're on Windows, I really encourage you to encode using something like TMPGEnc using the default DVD settings with a bitrate between 5 and 6.5 mB/s.

Remember, no matter how hard you try, if you're writing to DVD-R/DVD+R there will always be set-top players that won't be able to read the disks. I've had better success with DVD-R. Check out vcdhelp.com for more info.

I use either Scenarist (at work) or ReelDVD (at home) and for those I always have the program make an ISO image and burn the image from the DVD burning program (RecordnowMax, in my case). This is in place of having the program burn the disk, for some reason I've had better compatibility this way... go figure.

Obviously (assuming you're North American) you'll need NTSC friendly compositions (720x480 / D1 pixel aspect ratio / 29.97 fps / lower field first). Slide shows can also use still images, depending on your authoring program, but they will always end up being 720x480 on the screen.

mark_weiss

Regarding MPEG compression, I would strongly recommend CinemaCraft because if you're doing DVDs for mass distro, the quality needs to be up to commercial levels. Avoid shareware encoders--they produce horrible MPEG files.

raymond wiggins

Is this indeed a mass distribution, how are you intended to have the DVDs duplicated? DVD-R or DVD-5(etc)? If this is your first crack, I'd make sure you're in sync with your duplication house.