Authoring a DVD Video

Video Transcript

"In this clip, I will show you how to author a DVD. I will use PowerProducer 2 Gold. PowerProducer 2 Gold is a registered trademark of CyberLink, a company of which I have no affiliation with, whatsoever. Now, I'm using this software. You can use whatever software you can. There are free trials for many different types of software. You can find those on-line. They are usually fully functional trials for 30 days. So, I suggest that you look around try different ones out and see whichever one fits you. Use the one which works best for you, basically. The tough thing, about this or explaining this, is that they are all different. They'll have different methods on how you create the menus, that is, if you can create menus. How you create the extra content, how you import footage, actually render it and choose your options will be different. So they are very different, all of the pieces of software. I'll show you this one and just the basics of making a DVD with a very basic menu. OK, I'm here in PowerProducer 2 Gold. I am at the Import/Capture Content page. What I am doing here is, just basically, selecting what goes on to my DVD. For me, I already have some video files that are not edited, but I'm just going to put the video files on it. You can do whatever you'd like. You may already have video files that are ready or have this piece where you can actually capture directly to the DVD though a PC camera. So, it depends on what piece of software that you have, but for me I am going to import a couple of video clips here. They should pop-up down here. So, I'll put another one on here and you'll see this little bar down here go up. That's the size of these files. This is a single layer DVD that I am trying to make. It can only fit 4,700 MB on it, so I am already over that limit. However, I am going to continue anyway, because I am actually not going to go through the entire process. This is just to show you that you have to watch this bar. Be aware of it and try to shoot under it, or else you can't make your DVD. You may need to use a dual layer disc. Here's my two clips and I can use this to play them and see what they are. It has a little bit of a header here, blank stuff and then it goes into it. So, there it is. I'll go on to the next step. Now, we have our 'Preview' menu. There are all of these items on it, like 'Adjust color', ?Set Chapter Marks' within the video clips , the 'Customize' menu and all of that, as well as, the menu heading. That might be something that you'll want to do. Like, I'll just do DVD and you'll see a change, up here. I'm sure that there's a bunch of stuff in here. It shows how you can change the text color, the font and size and all of that fun stuff. Then there is the background, which you can just pick, it depends on the software, again. Sometimes they'll let you make a moving background, a video background. With that, you are actually adding another video file which plays in the background, but for here, it's just a picture and they have a default one. The same is true with the menu, 'Audio'. That would have a little song that would be on loop in the menu. So, what pretty much all applications do include, as well though, is this little virtual remote. As you can see, that if this was my menu and these were my two clips, I can go back and forth with my remote and see them. Then, we?ll say, "Play that one" and it goes right into it. It takes a little while to start, but that is just the clip. So now, it's playing and I want to go back the to the menu, I hit the menu button and I'm back on to the menu. So, yeah, it depends on what software that you're using, but that's the gist of the menu. This is pretty simplistic software. They can get really complex. You can add all of these fancy moving paths and everything. So, I am going to move on to the next step. This is when we are actually making the DVD or 'burning' it. It has new volume as a default and I'll just title it, 'Family Videos'. Now that will be the label that you'll see, if you popped it into a computer. It will come up as that. You can select how many copies that you want. You can always make more copies later, because it will save your files. That's pretty much it. Then, you'll go and you would 'burn' it. Pretty much, you have to feel out what the piece of software that you are using can do. For the most part, you are just going to import footage, make a menu and then 'burn' it. It should do the rest."