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

issues such as copy protection and region limitation. If your DVD does not have menus, you
will need to consider DVD specifications compliance which is ignored even by famous DVD
writing software such as NERO.
3.0 The Roads to Rome
Referring to the above diagram and let's recap the workflow we have discussed earlier. The
sequence of activities is: We Capture (or transfer) the video from the tapes on a camcorder
into an AVI files on a computer. The captured AVI files may have lots of scenes and some of
them may be useless so we need to go through the Editing to clean it up. Out of Editing we
get a good AVI file but it's not the format to be stored as a DVD. So the AVI file will be
Encoded into Mpeg-2 file making it ready to be used by the Authoring step. During
Authoring, menus, subtitles, and/or audio tracks are added. The result of Authoring needs
to be put on a physical medium such as DVD-R or DLT tapes and this is the job at the
Mastering stage.
This is only an overview picture. There are still subtle intricacies that need to be dealt with
at each stage. For example, out of encoding most software products require you to separate
the video and audio streams as .m2v file and .ac3 files. These issues will be addressed later
in the discussion.
3.1 Free Solutions
There are a lot of great DVD Authoring software products selling at very reasonable prices.
So using free software should not be financially motivated. To me experimenting free
software products is a good learning process. By going through each stage of the workflow
with a dedicated software, you get the insight on why things are done in certain way.
Eventually when you use commercial software you will appreciate the nature of work more.
Just like if you know how to use slide rule using a electronic calculator will be a piece of
cake.