Creating DVDs 1

[AndH]

I currently am running Adobe Premiere 6.0.

I'm looking to create DVD's of my edited videos, but I not sure where to start. Do I buy a DVD Recorder (such as Philips DVDR890 with ILink) and transfer edited footage from the Camera, or do I buy an internal PC DVD writer and burn direct via the PC, maybe using Premiere 6.5.

I'm keen to make my own interative menus for these DVD's too. Can this be done on the Philips recorder?

My preference is for the DVD Recorder (as I can use it to record TV programmes as well). My budget won't stretch to buying both a recorder and an internal writer for the PC.

Any suggestions will be most welcome! Cheers.

 

[WizyWyg]

Best bet is to go down to your Circuit City and test one of their DVD Recorders out.

there are several programs for the pc/mac that can author menus, but then again, you have to capture, re-edit, create, encode and that can take a lot of time.

For a 30 min program, I spend about 1 hour to do everything for it.

For a recorder 30=30 ..

 

[GEAK]

I'm going to offer an opinion opposite to WizyWyg's...

Long story short: Get a DVD burner. The burner's make doesn't matter, -R/RW vs +R/RW doesn't matter either (avoid DVD-RAM) and if you can't decide then get the Sony DRU500 (it'll write to DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW and CD-R/RW).
Then get a good authoring program (Premiere 6.5 won't author DVDs, all it does is pre-load your files and launches DVDIt - one particular authoring program).

Now the full story: Being a perfectionist, I don't mind spending extra time to get good results. With the right authoring program you'll get outstanding results. I've authored at least 35 discs and some of them (the ones I took my time on) rival many of the titles I've bought.

Also, I'm not too familiar with DVD-recorders but the last time I read about them they used DVD-RAM discs which are incompatible with most DVD players and DVD-ROM drives (by the sounds of it, I'm probably wrong).

I use the Pioneer DVR-A04 burner (DVD-R/RW) and Ulead's DVD Workshop for authoring. I've also used Sonic DVDIt! PE, Sonic MyDVD and a few others. I plan to try Spruce DVD Maestro because I hear it's the best of the best (you can only get hacked versions of Maestro since Apple bought Spruce).

BTW, the burner has little or nothing to do with interactive menu systems, it's the authoring software that does that and for the money, DVD Workshop is the best you can get. DVDIt! PE is lame... It's more expensive than DVD Workshop, it has fewer features and I found it to be crash prone and buggy.

I attempted to author at least two dozen discs with DVDIt and only succeeded once. I haven't had a failed attempt yet with DVD Workshop (35 successful discs and counting). WS supports multiple levels of menus, each menu page can have a sound file attached to it, the background and thumbnail images can be animated (loop or play once)... it's just great.

I will admit that this process is incredibly time consuming... I'll spend 2 hours capturing video (most of mine has already been edited), 2-3 hours to trancode it using TMPGEnc Plus (Premiere's MPEG encoder is slow, the bbMPEG Encoder plugin is slow and doesn't look as sharp as TMPGEnc), at least an hour selecting the chapter points, thumbnails and linking everything together, half an hour generate the DVD files and about an hour to burn.

Altogether you're looking at about 8 hours between capture and view... and that's assuming you've got all your motion menus pre-rendered.

 

[WizyWyg]

DVD Recorders are now DVD+R / -r / DVD+RW supported (There is a panasonic one that is still DVD-Ram), and many do "menus" as well (like in DVD Workshop, you choose "scenes" from the program and assign them as "menus&quot. Also, like a vcr, you can control what speed (bitrate = they use SP for best quality) you want to encode your video to a disc.

I've used Spruce Up, DVDit, Ulead DVD Workshop, and Pinnacles DVD Express with my Sony, and get my footage ready through TMpegEnc.

Still the recorders were faster.

 

[AndH]

Thanks for the responses.

I think I'm going to go for a DVD Burner for now(probably the Sony DRU500A - good reviews).

Now, one last question!

I've already edited about 1hr 30mins of holiday footage on Premiere 6.0 inc transitions (using Hollywood FX Copper), music etc. If I get a DVD Burner and, say DVD Workshop, how do I go about putting the edited footage plus interactive menus onto DVD?

Sorry if this is basic, but you've got to start somewhere!

 

[Pixelchik]

You might want to check out this website for info on creating an DVD ready MPEG 2 of your Premiere timeline:

http://www.dvdrhelp.com.

Like the previous posts, they suggest using TMpegEnc to encode to Mpeg2. Again as stated from previous posts, the menus and chapters are generated from the authoring program such as DVD Workshop,DVDit etc.