As the title states I'd like to know what the majority of you guys are using pay or freeware it matters not. I want to start making dvds with motion menus, background music and the whole 9 yards. I am making movies from avi, and various other formats and I have to have the highest of quality while maximizing the amount of video on a dvd. I'd like to hear pros and cons of your software of choice.
command line dvd-author XD nice animated menus and scene change chapters and all kinds of stuff.. but it takes knowledge and skill to set up the disk structure and menus.. professional commercial quality results for free IF you are prepared to put in the time and effort to learn how dvd's really work.
Would there happen to be a guide with using it or is it all trial and error? Also compared to DVD Author GUI would you say its harder or easier or about the same to learn?
the gui version is very limited in capability.. that's the price you pay for being "pretty" over raw function. there is a large wiki, and lots of info about how dvd's work scattered about.. once you grasp how the button overlays and layers work it's not as daunting as it first seems.. because you make your own "template" xml files for various disk structures and just drop in the bits you want. for example to do animated menus and you want to change the video.. once the menu is built specifying the name of the animated background file you just drop a suitable file in the "build" location... some high end video creation software is useful for this.. I use cinelerra dvd flick is basically built around dvd-author source... look at the capabilities of that and the thousands of menu templates (and how to build your own custom templates) on their forums.. use something else to make your mpeg2 files because that then gives you total control of the actual authoring process as well as the transcoding process. I'm guessing you are after high quality results over one click mediocrity.
You are 100% correct. I am pretty sure I have been going about this all wrong to start with. I understand that the more conversions and everything you do the more quality is lost. Let me just give you a brief. I start with avi's 95% of the time. I found that burning the avis many times is pixelated? in quality kind of blocky and not the best. I have a program Winx Free AVI to MPEG that converts to mpeg-2 which I think is superior. I can control everything from the audio sampling rate and quality and output mode (ac3 or mp3) and more importantly the video quality. I leave the frame rate at 29.97 and the bitrate? @ around 5000. It wont work above 5000 kbps. This is about as good as it gets and depending on the quality of the original avi it comes out pretty good. My authoring programs I have tried range from simple (no motion or background music) to increasinlgy complex motion clips, and background pictures and audio. I am tired of using one-click programs. I like the ease but I feel that there is better quality to be had and that is what I am willing to work for. Can you tell me your method in a nutshell in regards to what type of files you use and settings? Am I going about this wrong or am I on the right path?
