Making Professional DVD from Authoring to ... - CD Duplication

• Menu
Menus are like the table of contents for a DVD. On the remote controls of most DVD
players there is a Menu button. Pressing the Menu button will bring the screen to a
menu on which viewers can choose randomly to jump to specific part of the movie.
In it's simplest form a menu can be no more than just few text labels. But it can also
get fancy by adding a small movie as the button animation background. When you
author your DVD you will need to set break points on the video to mark them for
chaptering.
• Subtitle
Subtitles are like the Closed Captions (CC) on TV and they can be turn on or off if
your DVD player supports this. The most common application of subtitles is to
create different language subtitles for foreign viewers. For instance if the main
movie is in English and you want French or Spanish viewers to understand the plot,
you can add subtitles in French and Spanish. Besides texts, subtitles can be images
too and gaming DVDs sometimes do take advantage of this. Creating subtitles can be
time consuming task. But with the right tool it will be a pretty straightforward
process. We will talk about a free subtitle tool call Subtitle Workshop later.
• Audio Tracks
Just like the subtitles audio tracks can be turned on or off if a DVD player supports
this feature. With the remote control, you can imagine yourself going to a concert
where you can be the conductor to turn the violin on and make the cello silent.
Audio tracks can accomplish this effect so individual track can be turned on or off
and the overall sound is the resultant of all tracks that are turned on superimposed
together. The obvious application of audio track is again for foreign viewer to watch
the movie with foreign language voiced over. Combined with subtitles, you can have
many language combinations, say, French subtitle with Chinese voice over.
• Camera Angles
Camera Angles can be considered as having few movies played simultaneously and
the viewers can only pick one movie at a time. With this in mind, you can actually
design a DVD to play two totally different scenes and has nothing to do with the
camera angles. The original concept of camera angles is to look at a movie setting
from different angles. I rarely see any DVDs make use of this feature and was told
this can only be found in some promiscuous movies. The real estate people should
put this feature to work for them when trying to make a virtual tour for their
potential buyers.
• Copy Protection
Copy protection can only be added during the authoring step. Once a DVD is
authored and mastered there will be no way to add copy protection. Common copy
protection schemes are CSS and Macrovision. These are usually added at the last
stage of the authoring before transferring the result of the authoring to DLT tapes.
There is no copy protected DVD-R because DVD burners cannot write copy
protection information onto a DVD-R. If you need copy protection on your final
pressed DVDs, you will need to output your masters to DLT tapes instead of DVD-R.
No all DVD authoring software can add copy protections. If a software can output
the result to DLT tapes normally it will also have copy protection enabling feature.