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DVD on the menu<br />
Thanks to the dominance of DVD in home<br />
entertainment and <strong>com</strong>puting, desktop authoring<br />
of DVDs has really taken off. We’ve looked at<br />
several applications for creating DVD, drawn<br />
from across the scale.<br />
T<br />
he process of creating a DVD is the same whether you’re just burning<br />
data or constructing a flashy menu for a movie release. It consists of<br />
adding data to a project folder on a <strong>com</strong>puter, then laying out that<br />
project in an authoring package. Video and audio assets first need to be<br />
encoded to formats <strong>com</strong>patible with the DVD specification, and if you want<br />
your DVD to do anything more than store data, you’re going to have to<br />
incorporate some sort of menu system on your disc.<br />
Disc navigation is normally added in the form of menu screens and jump<br />
buttons that correspond to chapter points embedded in the media streams.<br />
Authoring applications allow you to link buttons to menu screens, media,<br />
and chapter points by either dragging-&-dropping the asset or item onto<br />
the button or by specifying the link in a properties field.<br />
Subtitles can be entered or imported, and colours can be set for the button<br />
to give some interactive feedback to the user. The project is then ‘built’, with<br />
the video and audio streams multiplexed together during this process and<br />
then written to the blank disc. All DVD authoring follows this same basic<br />
BY MICHAEL BURNS<br />
d 95
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