DVD burning guide

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This article deals with burning straight-play DVDs – in other words, DVDs that only contain the video and audio, with no menus. This is useful for when you want to put footage onto a DVD for submission to a film festival, distributor, agent, etc. Straight-play DVDs combine the convenience and simplicity of VHS cassettes with the image quality of DVDs.

Burning DVDs at home involves the following steps:

1. Encoding the original footage as an MPEG-2 file;

2. importing the MPEG-2 file and corresponding audio file in a DVD authoring program like DVD Studio Pro;

3. making the DVD authoring program create an image file of the DVD;

4. burning the DVD using a DVD burner. ___________________________________________________

1. Encoding the original footage as an MPEG-2 file

MPEG-2 is the standard DVD video format. To encode your video as an MPEG-2 file you will need an MPEG-2 encoder. Software encoders such as the Tsunami encoder (TMPGEnc) and the Cinemacraft encoder (CCE) can be purchased on the Internet, and most of them offer trial versions that will encode your video in exactly the same way as the full version, but with a watermark on it. This allows you to assess the encoder’s quality before buying it. Regardless of which MPEG-2 encoder you choose, the process is simple: assuming you have already exported your footage from your editing software as an AVI file or something similar, you tell the encoder which video file you want to encode, optimize the settings (a substantial topic in itself) and start the encoder.

The output file will be an MPEG-2 file of your video. As with any compressed video, its quality will depend on the data rate, and the data rate will, in turn, affect the file size. You will be burning the MPEG-2 file onto blank DVD-R and DVD+R media and there is therefore a practical upper limit to your video’s data rate. This is because the surface of blank DVD-R and DVD+R media is not as reflective as that of DVDs stamped using an injection molding process, so not all set top DVD players are able to cope with a high data rate on home-made DVDs. If a DVD player is unable to cope with the data on a DVD, playback will stutter.

If you want to ensure that your homemade DVDs will be compatible with as many set top DVD players as possible, the data rate of your MPEG-2 video should not exceed 7 Mbps – something to remember when tweaking your MPEG-2 encoder’s settings.

2a. Importing the MPEG-2 file and corresponding audio file into a DVD authoring program

This generally involves dropping the MPEG-2 video file onto the timeline of the DVD authoring program, with the audio file (if you have one) on the audio track. Ideally, you should encode the audio in the AC-3 (Dolby Digital) format, which will reduce its data rate without significantly reducing its quality. The advantage of this is that the combined data rate of the video and audio (which is what ultimately matters to the DVD player reading the data on the DVD) will be lower. The only other audio format that is compatible with all DVD players is PCM (uncompressed), which has a data rate of 1536kbps (1.536 Mbps). Compressing the audio into the AC-3 format is preferable, as it will allow you to use a higher data rate for the video.

b. Making the DVD authoring program create an image file of the DVD (muxing)

When you are ready to burn your DVD, the DVD authoring program will entwine the the video and audio files in a single file, called the image file, that it will burn on the DVD. This process is known as “muxing” (short for multiplexing).

3. Burning the DVD using a DVD burner

Once your DVD authoring program has created the image file, you can burn the DVD.

A DVD burner can be a worthwhile investment for filmmakers; in addition to the obvious advantage of easily producing DVDs at short notice on your desktop, DVDs can hold 4.7 GB of data, making them very useful in backing up large files. You can use your burner to save your editing program’s source video files on blank DVDs (when editing a movie, you should always back up your project files and source video files: you never know when your hard disk is going to fail).

Ensuring error-free DVD burning

Error-free DVDs are less likely to stutter during playback. There is a precaution you can take to ensure that the DVD burning process is as error-free as possible: clean the DVD’s surface using compressed air cans. It has been found that dust particles on the surface of the DVD can cause errors during the burning process, and that removing them with compressed air prevents this.

Another thing you can do to ensure the error-free burning of your DVD is to burn at a slow speed: ideally 1x, or the slowest speed available. Don’t bother buying blank DVDs that can be burned at 16x or 32x, because even if your DVD burner is capable of such speeds, burning a DVD at such a speed is likely to result in errors.

The procedure described in this article can be used to burn individual DVDs, avoiding the costs of DVD replication (making large numbers of DVD-Rs) or DVD duplication (pressing DVDs), which is ideal when you need to make DVDs on a need-to-have basis rather than in bulk. However, if you decide to produce pressed DVDs (duplication), a DVD-R burned at home can be submitted to the relevant company, which will use it to produce a glass master. In this case you need not worry about DVD players having trouble with the data rate: you can use the maximum 10.08 Mbps combined data rate allowed by the DVD standard. This figure includes all data streams on the DVD: video, audio, menus, stills and titles.