Tutorials > Creating your own dvd!

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#226546 by unknown[4] at 2005-06-01 23:57:11 (8 years ago) - [Report]

Will show you how to create your own dvd... with menu, with chapters..

Open the program
The software I'll be using is 'Ulead Videostudio 9'.
After installing open VideoStudio 9. If you want to make the project in 16:9, make sure you already set it to that in THIS screen. (number 1 in pic)
Goto MovieWizard. (number 2 in pic)

This image has been resized, click here to view the full-sized image.

Importing your files
After clicking next, you will want to set you media you will be using on your dvd.
I think the buttons explain themselves in this screen. Click 'capture' if you want do capture the data from for example your camera (which you have connected to your pc). Click insert video to import video files that are located on your hard disk. Alot of video files are supported. avi, gif, mov, mpeg, swf, wmv and more!!
You can also import images from your hard disk. As you may have guessed, loads of filetypes are supperted once again. For this tutorial I imported one picture, and 2 movie files. Make sure that if you use an image... you set it's duration! My window looks like this now:

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Note that the picture.. which looks pretty lame at first sight.. will look pretty cool while watching it. It will slightly move, and have some effect. It will make the thing look cooler for sure... depending on the template you choose

Now click next again.

Choosing your own style
You can now choose the template you want to use. Just try some and preview them clicking the play button. When you're satisfied with the result... click next.

Exporting to a file
You now have 3 options. With 'create file' you will make a single movie file of the whole content. You can save the movie file as: 'dv', 'dvd', 'vcd', 'svcd', 'wmv'. If that's no good for you... you can use a custom type. It will allow you to choose a type not mentioned before. There's loads of options there... Let's have a quick walk through them.

avi options wrote:

General >
Frame size:
For a decent quality, you'll probably want something around 640x... make sure you pick the right one... or your dvd player might not be able to play it... or it just doesn't look very good. All depends on if you have PAL or NTFS. There's also the user defined screen size, but I suggest you don't use that.

Compression>
You probably want to use some kind of compression, otherwise the file will be huge. 'Cinepak Codec by Radius' is one of my favorites... you'll have to try them out yourselve to see what you like best. Just leave the other options to standard. If you want you could also use a audio compression.. 'MP3; 44100 Hz, 192 kbps, CBR, stereo' is what I would advise, but again, you gotta try them out.

mov options wrote:

General > Frame size is the same story as the avi options...
Compression >
As compression, I like to use Cinepak or MPeg 4. You can try the quality... see what gives you the best result compared to the files size. I suggest you leave the data type to 24 bits.

Myself.. i'm not a big fan of mov files... they usually turn out to be quite big at a decent quality.. and the support by most other programs is not very high.

mpg options wrote:

General> Again the same story with frame size..
Compression>
Since you're not saving the thing as dvd... i suppose you don't want the dvd quality. Therefor, choose either MPEG-1 or MPEG-2. Leave the quality to somewhere around 70. You'll probably want to set Video data ratio to variable. Standard is 6000... I suggest you leave it on that. The audio settings: Stereo, 44100 Hz, 192 kbps. I seriously doubt you'd hear a difference if you set it higher.

wmv options wrote:

Profile>
Since wmv is such a quickly growing filetype.. I'll quickly cover it. Note though... it is not meant for purposes I've made this tutorial for... it's rather for smaller clips. While browsing through all the standard profiles... you most important things you'll want to pay atention to is Video bit rate and Video size. Once again note... this filetype was (if i'm not mistaken here) made especially for the internet. I suugest you use it for that! Therefor, don't make the quality too high.. in order to keep the sizes down... and the downloaders happy.

I can't say it enough... try the filetypes until you find one that really fits you. And even then, it can't hurt to try some other, because you never know what you're missing

Create a dvd
First thing to notice (where I hope you haven't already set up the whole dvd in the previous windows).. you'll have to import the video files again if you want them all to have their own chapter. In this window, you can set wether you want a menu or not. You can choose the files you want on your dvd. You can set chapters for every file. Note that I have made the intro movie in the previous part(s) of this tutials, which WILL be used on the dvd. You can set it to run as intro movie, by checking 'Use first clip as introduction video' (1). You can add a video, just by clicked the 'add video' button (2). When you have a file checked other then the intro (in the index window below) you can add/edit chapter by clicking 'add/edit chapter' (3). If you want a menu on your dvd, check 'Create menu', right under 'add/edit chapter' (3).

This image has been resized, click here to view the full-sized image.

Add/edit chapter
First, there is an option to add a chapter after ever ... minutes... which can be very usefull if you don't want to figure it out all by yourself. You can do this by clicking 'Auto..', make sure 'Add chapters at fixed intervals' is checked.. and set the number of minutes to whatever you like.
If you want to insert the chapters manually, you can do this by browsing through the movie. You can either play and pause the movie... or by dragging the locator to the desired location. Either way, stop at the frame you want to insert the chapter. Then all you gotta do is click 'add' in the right menu. You can delete chapters by selecting them in the right frame.. and click delete. You can very easilly chapter all your files, by using to dropdown menu in the top of the screen, to switch files. When you're done setting all your chapters... press ok.

Click next to go to the screen where you can create your menu.

Creating your menu
You can have a motion menu. A motion menu is a menu that's playing a video on the background. Set can do this by checking 'motion menu'. Since there are loads of very good standard menu's... i'm not gonna make one myself (it isn't really what this tutorial is about anyway... maybe i'll do that another time

). Note that in every frame you can choose... you can still change the 'frame' (the lines around) the screenshot of your video, where your video's are placed on the page, the images used for next.. home etc, and even the font on the page!
First, select a menu template. Click customize. In the dropdown menu you can select 'scene frame', 'Layout' and 'button image'. Select 'scene frame'. This is where you can select the border around the screenshot of your movie. You can see a preview on the left. Go to layout. Here you can setup where everything is placed. Go to button image. Here you can select the buttons showed on your menu. As mentioned earlier, on the left you can see a preview of the menu. In that preview, click on any text. Clicking one of those options will make you able to change the font in which the texts are displayed.
If you want to use your own background, you can also do that. Click on background. Click either 'Image file' or 'Video file' (whatever you want to use), and open the file you want to use as your background. That's pretty much it for creating your own menu's. Make sure that before you click ok, you have clicked 'Add to menu template'. Now click ok.

You were just able to change to fonts of the text... now you want to change the actual text. It's very easy.. just click on the text in the preview, change the text, and click ok.
Now there's still the screenshot. Sometimes, a movie start with a black screen... or maybe the first frame doesn't fit the menu at all... or you just want another image. Click the screenshot in the preview screen. Drag the locator to the location where you find a nice screenshot. Click ok... and the screenshot is changed.
Then there still the numbers with every screenshot. These you can remove very if you want. Click on 'Advanced settings'... click 'Show Thumbnail Number'. DONE!
Here's what my menu looks like now:

This image has been resized, click here to view the full-sized image.

Checking out the dvd
You will want to preview the dvd now. Click next. You'll find yourself looking at a dvd player. Click play to start the dvd. If you don't like something... click back and change it. If everything's fine, click next.

Burning the dvd
First, it may be nice to give the dvd a name. Change the text after 'Disc Volume Label'.
You can choose to 'Burn to disc', 'Create DVD folders', 'Create disc image file' or 'Normalize audio'. I would have no idea what 'Normalize audio' does :whistle:

Burn to disc:
Burn the whole thing to a dvd. Note this this will first make the dvd on the hard disk... then copy it to the dvd, and then delete it from the hard disk. I do not like this method... because if anything should go wrong.. you'd have to spent another 2 hours (or less.. depending on the length and the files) encoding the whole thing.
Create image disc file:
You create an image disc, as it is on the dvd. This means you get an AUDIO_TS folder... a VIDEO_TS folder... where all the files are in the VIDEO_TS folder. You can burn this later by burning the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS folder onto the root of a dvd. Note that the AUDIO_TS folder isn't needed.
Create disc image file:
Create a signle file, more or less the disc itself. You can burn this on 2 ways (for as far as I know

). You could burn image using nero or dvddecrypter... (this is what I always do). This is probably the fastest way. Though this way, you are not able to watch it on your computer. If you want to do that, you'd first have to mount the image...

mylostspirit wrote:

You should use a program to mount the image. I use 'Deamon toold'. After installing and rebooting, you will find the icon in the system tray (standard in the right bottem of your screen). Right click the icon. Go to 'Virtual CD/DVD-ROM'. Go to 'Set number of devices'.. and make sure that's it's set to at least 1. Go to 'Virtual CD/DVD-ROM' again. Go to a device of your choice (if it's set to 1, you'll have no choice). Click 'mount image'. Browse to the directory you extracted the image file in. You may have to set file type to All files (*.*). Select the image, and click open. The image will now be mounted.

Look in 'My Computer' for the drive the dvd is mounted on... and then use any dvd copying software to copy it just like you would copy a cd.
Have fun

I wrote this tutorial to make more people able to create their own good looking dvd's. Recently I found some friends were having problems to do this... so I figured more people would. I hope you like this tutorial, and it's usefull in one way or another (yeah... it's a bit long... I noticed too

). If you don't like it... well just move on. Rather then telling me 'This tutorial sucks', please tell me something like 'I would change this part [text] for this [text] because...' because then it's something usefull for everybody.

If you are reading this tutorial and having problems to follow it (which I doubt, because i pretty much described every step), just pm me and ask your question. In reply, I will add the anwser to the tutorial, with extra pictures or not...

Also... the mods would probably be greatfull if you didn't just quote the whole tutorial :smirk:

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