Video Edit and Authoring
Video editing and recording onto DVD remains one of the best applications of a fast, capable PC. You can do everything you used to do with a VCR, including preserving both off-the-air broadcasts and camcorder video, but do it with better quality and with editing to select just the parts you want. Your PC can do more than the standalone DVD recorders, too, because you can get software that’s more capable than what’s hardwired into the standalone units. You can now get dual-layer DVD burners too, enabling you to store about 9 GB (about 2 hours of standard quality compressed video) on a single disk.
InterVideo WinDVD Creator 2 — With a user interface similar to that of Pinnacle Studio, we were prepared to like WinDVD Creator as much as we like WinDVD, which is our favorite DVD player software. Our initial work with it went well, but after we discovered it crashed regularly on files we’d pulled in with another manufacturer’s video capture card and codec, we gave up. If you can be sure you’ll never need a foreign codec, you might like WinDVD Creator.
Pinnacle Systems Studio and Expression — We’ve used Studio since we started making DVDs, and like it a lot. Unfortunately, we’ve had problems with it, too. The version of Studio we use, Studio 8, often fails to keep the audio and video in synchronization, and has a relatively slow MPEG-2 encoder. It’s possible those problems have been fixed in Studio 9, but when we read part of the license agreement that gave them unlimited permission to make changes to our computers remotely, with no liability to them for problems created, we terminated the install. Pinnacle Expression is a basic authoring package and doesn’t seem prone to the synchronization problems Studio has, so the pair give you the total capability you need.
Ahead Software NeroVision Express 3 — As we’ve come to expect from Ahead Software, NeroVision Express 3 was a solid, reliable program that on installation recognized and was compatible with the dual-layer Sony DVD burner we used.We found the user interface (Figure 3-22) a little clunky and dumbed down as compared to Pinnacle Studio, but if you can work past that, this might be the one to choose.
Regardless of the software you use, making a DVD consists of these steps:
1. Capture the source video as one or more clips. Use the best source format you can, such as S-Video, and — ideally — capture to disk with no compression or lossless compression. You’ll want to preserve the choice of compression parameters for when you write the DVD, and multiple compression cycles only reduce the video quality.
2. Edit the video into a complete program.We generally combine all the clips together, leaving breaks only where we want menus to go on the DVD. Add any necessary sound tracks and transition effects.
3. Render the completed program to disk. Strictly speaking, you don’t have to do this before you burn the DVD, but we’ve encountered enough problems in the authoring steps following this one that it’s a time-saver to keep a copy of the final version. Editing and rendering go much faster if the source and destination files are on local disks, and faster yet if they are themselves on different physical disks.
4. Build the DVD menu (or menus if you have so many clips you’re setting as chapters that you need to segment them) in your authoring software. Set a background image, number of menu items, item formats, and item images as you want, then test the menu operation. Testing is useful to make sure you’ve defined the menu the way you want.
If you extract short video segments from the program or another source — say, 10 to 20 seconds — some programs let you set them as the menu item or screen background.
5. Burn the DVD and test it in a DVD player. Set the compression so the program adjusts the degree of compression to make the overall program just fit on the DVD, which will give you the least degree of compression and the highest video quality that fits on the DVD.