Hi all First Post Glad I found You I've been shooting video since the late sixties (more like 16mm film) Have decided to get into the dvd production business and apart from a ton of reading I still don't know much I'll be shooting 3 static cameras, thru a mixer/switcher capture and squeeze with sorenson, splice together with something like mediaware myflix/edit then I'd like to burn nec 3500a right away without authoring. Questions are, What will the receipient of this dvd see when they get it home to play on their dvdplayer/tv? Is a menu necessary to initialize the player? ReasonI'm in the dark is that all my dvd stuff is attachedto computers and I've no knowledge of living room viewdvd stuff. Reason for desire to bypass menu stage is just for speed of project completion Any comment welcom Bruce
A menu isn't necessary, but a certain amount of authoring is. When a DVD player reads a DVD it looks for the VIDEO_TS folder. once it finds that folder it looks inside for VIDEO_TS.IFO. That file contains the instructions for playing the disc. Normally those instructions point to a menu, but they can also point directly to a movie instead. I'd suggest using DVD-Lab to author the DVDs. It shouldn't take more than a few seconds to set it to play the movie immediately (delete the default menu and drag a connection to the movie to start it automatically). That way you can have actual DVD files without the hassle of creating menus. You could also create the DVD structure and save it with no actual video/audio included. After that all you'd have to do is open the project, import the video and audio as either separate files or in the same file, and drag them into the project. Then it can create the files and even automatically burn the disc for you if you want.
thanks vurbal Another question or 2 if I may: Is an Audio_TS folder necessary if the audio is embeded in the mpeg2 file. I suspect it is not. Been tampering with Encore1 and dvd workshop2. Encore is my choice at the moment but will have a go at DVD-Lab as per your recommendation. Will any of these authoring programs produce an iso file which I can subsequently burn using discjuggler? Ilike specialty programs which only do one thing and they tend to do it better than multifunction applications? I appreciated you getting back to me and will try no to be too much of a bother. Bruce
No it's not. I've seen people claim that there are players that won't play a DVD because it doesn't have an AUDIO_TS folder, but I've never seen any specific brands or models listed and I think it's really just a precautionary thing (and I always use it myself). In fact I've seen some commercial DVDs that don't include that folder. DVD-Lab won't create ISO files for you, although there are other programs, like DVD-Shrink or IMGTool that can create them from authored DVD files. I'm not familiar with Encore's features, but if DVD-Lab doesn't have a feature you want you might want to check out DVD-Lab Pro. It's probably something you'd want to look at eventually anyway. And don't worry about being a bother That's why we're here. Just make sure to stick around and help somebody else. If you have any questions about DVD-Lab we have a couple of experts who post regularly. They can probably be more helpful with it. I need to buy a copy myself (when I can afford it).
