Trick for cramming 5 hrs into DVD-9?

[Walter Biscardi]

Honestly I would make two DVDs and split them in whatever way is natural. My wife has a lot of of DVDs like this that contain two discs in one package. Those are easy to get these days.

Dual Layers are not all that hard, but if you don’t set the layer break perfectly, there will be playback issues. If it was me, I’d keep it simple and just create two discs.

We recently did a 5 disc project because we were able to find a really nice 5 DVD case. The client loved it and it came out better than I thought.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Bob Cole]

[walter biscardi] “Dual Layers are not all that hard, but if you don’t set the layer break perfectly, there will be playback issues. If it was me, I’d keep it simple and just create two discs.”

Thank you very much indeed for that advice. Very interesting. If it were up to me, I’d create two discs in a heartbeat rather than mess with a DVD-9 dual layer. I will make my best effort to suggest two DVDs.

But in the event that the client insists on one DVD, do you have any suggestions about how to set the layer break perfectly? Does manual control over the layer break increase or decrease one’s chances of a perfect layer break? Is Encore good at this — better than DVD SP4 (with which I am not very familiar)? How do you know whether you have set the layer break correctly?

This goes back to my earlier question about whether I should try to get a dual layer DVD burner, to test the authoring.

Thanks very much.

Bob C

[John Foley]

Which Mac are you using? All recent Mac Towers and most iMac computers have dual layer burners from the factory. You can look at the Apple System Profiler in Utilities and see which DVD burner mechanism you have, to be sure.

The trick when using a DVD-9 (dual layer) is to be sure the top layer content is larger than the botton layer. DVD Studio has a mechanism that allows it to selct that point, automatically, but you can calculate it from the timecode. Just make sure there is at least >1 minute more material in the top layer than in the bottom.

Be sure to test it with the simulator before building and burning.

As a point of fact. I have not been able to use DVD-R dual layer discs in any of my Pioneer DVD burners, but DVD+R works fine.

[John Foley]

Sorry, I forgot which forum I was in and assumed you were on a Macintosh.

[Bob Cole]

[John Foley] “Sorry, I forgot which forum I was in and assumed you were on a Macintosh.”

Actually I have both. I’ve been using Encore on the PC because I’m familiar with it, but I have a tower with DVD SP4.

Confession: the reason I haven’t used DVD SP4 on the Mac is that I opened it up and found it confusing, and so I went back to the tried and true Encore on the PC.

The other, better reason for staying on the Encore/PC side is that my PC has a SCSI connection to a DLT tape drive, for preparing DVD masters on tape properly.

But the dual layer burner is a strong motivator. Could you recommend a good tutorial source for DVD SP4? I just want to be able to add my own background (non-motion) for the menu.

Thanks!

bob c