Why is it so hard to make a DVD?

[Shane Ross]

#42 – Quick and dirty way to author a DVD

Shane’s Stock Answer #42 – David Roth Weiss’ Secret Quick and Dirty Way to Author a DVD:

The absolute simplest way to make a DVD using FCP and DVDSP is as follows:

1. Export a QT movie, either a reference file or self contained using current settings.

2. Open DVDSP, select the “graphical” tab and you will see two little monitors, one blue, one green.

3. Select the left blue one and hit delete.

4. Now, select the green one, right click on it amd select the top option “first play”.

5. Now drag your QT from the broswer and drop it on top of the green monitor.

6. Now, for a DVD from an HD source, look to the right side and select the “general tab” in the track editor, and see the Display Mode, and select “16:9 pan-scan.”

7. Hit the little black and yellow burn icon at the top of the page and put a a DVD in when prompted. DVDSP will encode and burn your new DVD.

THATS ALL!!!

NOW…if you want a GOOD LOOKING DVD, instead of taking your REF movie into DVD SP, instead take it into Compressor and choose the BEST QUALITY ENCODE (2 pass VBR) that matches your show timing. Then take THAT result into DVD SP and follow the rest of the steps. Except you can choose “16:9 LETTERBOX” instead of PAN & SCAN if you want to see the entire image.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[John Pale]

[Shannon Bedford] “‘I’ve changed the quality to Average 7.7 mbps and Max 9 mbps”

This is way too high. No DVD player can handle this high a bit rate on a DVD-R.

[Shannon Bedford] “I am testing this on short clips in HDV format footage (1080i50) which I have deinterlaced”

This isn’t the cause of the playability problem…but why are you doing this..you are throwing away a lot of resolution, in addition to the resolution lost when downconverting to SD.

[Gabriele Sartori]

Many reasons why a DVD can be suboptimal. In general with consumer or prosumer cameras you will never get something similar to the DVDs you buy. Nobody can debug your case remotely without more information but if you are making DVDs just for yourself and you have a HDV camera you way want to go straight for blu-ray. The level of difficulty is very similar and some programs like Toast take care of the authoring part with a few clicks. The end result is usually MUCH better. There is more resolution, more chroma and you end up with a product that will make you happier. All this I can say without having more info on what you are doing. Also, you may want to check the other FCP forum, there are many answers already.

Regards
Gabriele

Gabriele – California

[Michael Sacci]

[Shannon Bedford] “but in the dvd player it just won’t play.”

99.9% of the time this is because you are creating an HD DVD disc instead of a standard DVD. HD DVD will only playback on an Intel Mac or a discontinued HD DVD player.

[Shannon Bedford]

What bit rate would you recommend?
(I took that bit rate from a tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFgJpd7DEWw 3.5 min in)

The deinterlacing is a whole other issue – I’ll discuss that in another blog to save confusion.

Thanks for your help

S Bedford, Western Australia

[Shane Ross]

Stick to the presets…

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Shannon Bedford]

A few people have said that the presets are best for longer projects where you can save space on the disc using a lower bit rate. My projects rarely go over 10 min and I’d like the quality to be as high as possible.
Or, is there a better preset I’ve missed? I’m using Best Quality 90 min.

S Bedford, Western Australia

[Shane Ross]

Best 90 is what I use. I don’t see much difference when I tinker with the bit rate. Oh, except the DVDs ALWAYS work…and still look good.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Loic De lame]

If anyone is interested as well, I use this little calulator to help figure out what bitrate to use to fill DVDs the most. Don’t forget to lower the Average bitrate if you have more complex menus.

Bitrate Calculator (https://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm)

You can search it on google and you’ll see a bunch of other ones it you don’t like this one.

And I have successfully made DVDs with bitrates of 7.0Mbps Average and 8.2Mbps Max. The audio gets encoded by the default Dolby Digital 2.0 at 192kbps
What you have to not forget about is that your audio is riding along the stream for the ride.

I use DVD studio and if you put the Max Bitrate at 9.0, it throughs an error that your bitrate is too high.

Hope this helps.

~ Loïc

[John Pale]

If you are unhappy with the quality using the preset that Shane suggested, make your own preset with it set to CBR (constant bit rate) at 6.8. A DVD player should have no trouble with that, and the quality should be fine, unless you have some particularly difficult to encode media.

It is very important that you encode the audio to AC3. Change the default settings in the AC 3 encoder from the default “Film Standard Compression” to None, and change the Dialog Normalization setting to -31. The settings they use for the preset will not give the best results (but will not make a DVD unplayable).

If you are still having playability issues, check the DVD in other players. You may have a slightly out-of-spec DVD player that does not play DVD-R’s well.