BestVideoMaker

DVD-burning tips

(Page 3 of 3) <<< Muxing MPEG-2 video and audio

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. 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. Compressed air cans are generally available in shops that sell photographic equipment.

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 (having large numbers of DVD-Rs made for you by a company) 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.

<<< Muxing MPEG-2 video and audio

DVD-burning tips

3. Burning the DVD using a DVD burner

Ensuring error-free DVD burning