Pat Horridge, Technical Director
“We have finished the program, now let’s just run off a DVD”. Unfortunately, properly authored DVDs cannot be produced in real time. For example, a 30 minute program will have its material reviewed at least 4 times i.e. 2 hours of viewing; twice for dual pass encoding and twice while proofing on a DVD player and a PC. Add in time for set up, authoring, disk burning and spot re-encoding to fix problems and half a day will have passed. Any major problems will take longer.
DVD are also the last part of the process. Parts of a program can be omitted but you cannot use the DVD authoring process to make changes or continue editing. For instance, you cannot add a fade to the start of a piece. You can only encode what is already on tape. It is possible to insert still images and title cards but we would not recommend this. PowerDVD, a PC DVD software player used by the majority of PC users, has a problem playing back still images in that it ignores the display time and only shows them for one frame. In general, if you want stills in your sequence then include them in the edit.