How to Burn a DVD

Video Transcript

"Hi Michael Burton with michaelburtonfilms.org located in Salt Lake City, Utah and I'm talking today about using Microsoft Windows. What I want to teach you next is how to burn a DVD. And there are many different ways to burn DVD's. Just like there are many different types of DVD's. Here you see that I've got a plain cheapy DVD and I've got a white kind of a matte face on it that you can actually print directly on it. I'm going to show you how to burn one of these DVD's whether it's data, whether it's direct copy, whether you're importing a product directly from your video camera and burning right to DVD. I'm going to show you how to do all these things today. Let me start by saying that Windows XP is a registered trademark of Microsoft and I am in no way affiliated with Microsoft. If you're just looking to burn a DVD copy or you're looking to burn a data disc which is where you can put any type of files on these DVD's like for example I sometimes do backups of certain files like photos, music, video clips to DVD's to store in my office. That way one they don't take up too much room on the hard drive, and two just in case my computer were to crash I'd have most of it saved but not necessarily on an external drive, I can have them saved on DVD if I'm not planning on using those files anytime soon but that way they're backed up. So I'm going to show you a couple different ways to do this though the main program that I use on the Windows p.c. is if you go down here to the start menu and bring up, you can look in All Programs or I've got it right here on my Start Menu. It's called Digital Media Home. I think it comes standard now with any p.c. that you purchase. It's from Sonic. When you bring up the program the Sonic Digital Media Plus, yeah it has a lot of different options here on the left where you've got tools, you've got different video data, copies, audio, all these different options over here. Now being that this could be a little bit confusing I'll kind of walk you through it. The main one, now for example if you have a movie, a home video or a DVD or a, yeah some movie that you already have currently put on a DVD. You want to make an exact copy of that DVD? The best thing to do is to go where it says copy here. Just like it says click here to make copies of disc and to burn or save disc images. You'll click on copy. This gives you a couple different options here to your right. You can either do an exact disc copy. You can burn an image to the disc or you can save the image to a hard drive coming off of the disc. Either one. Now the most common use is to actually make a disc copy of a DVD that you currently have. Now keep in mind that this does not work with copyrighted DVD's. Such as Spiderman or Superman or something like that. Those DVD's are copyrighted and they do not make direct disc copies especially with this program. But if you have a home video, some other type of video that you've previously made on DVD. Maybe even some of the old time DVD's that don't have the up to date copyrights on them then it would possible to get away with. What you do here is it says insert the disc you wish to copy in the drive below. So here you go you select the drives that you want. You select the drive that you're putting the disc into that you're recording onto down here where it says insert a blank or rewritable disc in the drive below. And in the drive up here you insert the disc that you're recording from. That you're actually copying. And then all you do is you come down here to this big red button down here and you click the red button of course after you've put in the DVD. Now over here on the left below where it says insert disc and it says no disc, I currently have no disc in there. But for example if I were to pop one in which I'm going to do real quick and we'll wait for a second and see what happens, it should pop up and it'll tell me exactly how much space I have left on this disc. Most discs, these blank medias, can hold up to 4.7 gigabytes. Of course you can buy larger than that nowadays. You can also buy HD DVD's which contain a lot more information or can hold a lot more information, excuse me. And but see right here it says estimated 4.4 gigabyte free space which I know that's off a little bit because these DVD's should hold 4.7 gigabytes and there's nothing on this DVD so that's a little bit off. But that'll tell you exactly where you're at. And if you were to put in a DVD that you were going to copy which I don't have any except for copyrighted DVD's so it's not going to work anyway. But if I want to make an exact copy of that you would just like I said put the disc in and it'll tell you how much of that video will fit onto your blank media. And then you'll come down here and you'll click the red button and then you just wait for your DVD to finish burning and then you're done. It's that easy. That's why this is very commonly used to copy home videos or other types of media because it's so quick. It's quick and easy. Now the other way to do it is for example a data. If you look over here on the left it says data. Click here to create data disc or to archive your files. This is one I use all the time like I said because I tend to archive a lot of my files off of the computer and not on the external drives. Because they're files that I don't need for a while or photos or I'm trying to put them in basically digital photo albums where I can store these photos in case any of my drives crash because they're too important to me. So over here on the right you've got your Easy Archive and you've got your Data Disc. The Data Disc, the Easy Archive pretty much works the exact same way by transferring, you transfer them to disc or a hard drive using the back up technology. But you can do that manually as well. You don't need to use the program. But I usually use the Data Disc button right here, okay? When you click on Data Disc it'll bring up a little like a window right here. Like it says, to add data to your disc click the add data button, which is up here on your left, or you can just drag and drop. I usually just drag and drop. So for example over here on my desk top I have this HD Opener video clip. If I want to just drag it over and drop it in my item box here this video's now ready to be burned to the DVD. Which by the way remember I already put one in so down here on the left it tells me exactly how much space I have free. This video's only 6 megabytes large. It's only a few seconds long and so it's not taking up a lot of the space and so coming down here and clicking this red button would burn that video clip to my DVD with no problem. I have plenty of space. And again if you want to add more items you can just add more items or drag and drop more."