DVD advice for Newbie

Paul_Varjak wrote on 11/7/2002, 10:50 AM
Hi:
I am working with Vegas 3.0 and have converted a VHS tape of old home movies to DV with the help of a new Sony Camcorder. I was amazed at how smoothly that part has gone. I've completed all the editing and would like to burn it onto DVD. During capture I broke down all of the home movies into individual shorts ranging from 2 minutes up to 20. Here are my questions:

1. Should I combine all of my .veg files into one file so that the DVD would play through. I assume if I left them all as individual files they would all become seperate chapters which I don't want.

2. What settings should I use; PAL v. NTSC, what size etc. I don't really know the differences between PAL & NTSC. I assume that I will have to render the file as an MPEG-2 to prepare it for DVD.

3. My computer came with MyDVD. Is this a reliable program to use? If not what program is?

Any feedback would greatly be appreciated.

My specs are:
Dell 8200
512 MB RAM
120 GB HD
60 GB external HD
64 MB video
2.0 GHz


Thanks,
Paul Varjak

Comments

earthrisers wrote on 11/7/2002, 11:27 AM
1. If you leave them separate .veg files, then on a DVD they will become separate movies, not separate chapters. (On a DVD, a "chapter" is a specific point you can jump to WITHIN a movie.)
2. Choice of PAL vs NTSC depends upon which part of the world you live in. North America uses NTSC, Australia and lots of other places use PAL. Exception to geography rule: if, for example, you bought a TV in Australia and brought it to North America, it would need PAL input (and you wouldn't be able to use it to receive local [American] broadcast television, nor to play media produced for North America).

PDB wrote on 11/7/2002, 12:11 PM
As far as MyDVD, beware that it may re-encode your mpeg files (I got it bundled with my firewire card) You might try it out to see if it does re-encode but it is worth considering other authoring apps:

* Ulead Movie Factory - 49$ approx
* Dazzle dvd complete - 99$ approx
* Ulead Dvd workshop - close to 300$ I believe.

(Movie factory has a 30 day demo with full features)

If you want to have a constant streaming film, you're going to have to render the various clips into a single film I'm afraid...

vonhosen wrote on 11/7/2002, 12:14 PM
MyDVD will not re-encode you files if they are DVD compliant. If they are not then it will re-encode resulting in quality loss.
Paul_Varjak wrote on 11/7/2002, 5:23 PM
Thanks for the feedback. What size should the settings be? I have it set for 720 x 480 x 32. Will this be sufficient when I burn to DVD?

Thanks,
Paul
nolonemo wrote on 11/8/2002, 12:48 AM
>> 1. If you leave them separate .veg files, then on a DVD they will become separate movies, not separate chapters. (On a DVD, a "chapter" is a specific point you can jump to WITHIN a movie.)<<

This may be a little picky, but that's not necessarily true, depending on your authoring program. For example, in DVD Workshop, you can bring in lots of clips and make one movie out of them, it all depends if you set it up so at the end of each clip it goes on to the next clip, or set it up so that at the end of a clip it goes back to the menu (option exists for each clip. This is a function of the authoring , so could make several "movies" program. (BUT. . . note that in DVD WS, the transition between clips is not smooth, so I render everything from VV to one mpg for each "movie" I want on a disk.