Mastering DVDs
Homemade DVDs don't have to look homemade. Here's how to create slick discs that hold more than video and that work in any player.
So you've got a digital camcorder and you know how to use it. That's the easy part. Even the task of editing your footage down to a tight, entertaining movie isn't terribly difficult, especially if you use novice-oriented software like Adobe Premiere Elements.
But to wow friends and family with your sharp cinematic skills, you'll want to produce a DVD with all the trimmings: professional-looking menus plus photo slide shows and bonus features. For this project, we'll use Adobe Premiere Elements to produce a "season highlights" DVD to share with members of a soccer team.
If you scout around, you'll find plenty of DVD authoring packages on the market that can help you produce a nice-looking digital video disc. In this how-to, we'll be using Premiere Elements because it's reasonably inexpensive ($100) and its video editing tools are easy to master; a further advantage is that you can use a single application for all the steps from transferring video from your camcorder to your PC through burning the final product to DVD. The basic steps involved in making a polished disc, however--assembling and organizing its content (including the already-edited video), choosing what goes into the menus, customizing the look of the menus, and burning your disc--are similar for most other DVD-authoring apps as well.
Step 1: Pull Together Your Materials
To import photos and video into Premiere Elements, click the
Premiere Elements' multipurpose Timeline window is a typical video-editing environment, though you can drop photos and other media files here, too. You can always access the Timeline via the
For our season highlights DVD, we wanted to include video, still photos, and PDFs of our soccer team's roster and its league certificate. Premiere Elements permits importation of all major video, audio, and graphics file formats; but you might want to save space on the DVD by first converting very large graphics files, such as TIFFs, into a more compact form, such as JPEG files. If you want to include file types that Premiere Elements doesn't support, such as Word documents or PDFs, either you have to convert them to a format that Premiere supports or you have to use a second program to put them onto the disc after you've done most of your authoring. (In a folder on your hard drive, collect all the materials you won't be including in the Premiere Elements project; you'll come back to them later.)
A popular way to share photos is by putting together an animated slide show--an easy trick with Premiere Elements' Timeline. To create a slide show, use the
Step 2: Make a Menu for Your DVD
A commercial DVD contains two kinds of menus: a title menu, which displays chapters (or the disc's elements); and scenes menus, which let viewers jump quickly to various places in your movie. Accompanying each menu entry is a button that viewers can click to navigate to the corresponding piece of content on the disc. In Premiere Elements' timeline, you can create menus and buttons that organize your disc in various ways on the basis of three types of markers: main menu, scene, and stop.
After you've assembled your movie in Elements' Timeline, you can get started setting the markers. Right-click the Timeline's time rule and choose
Whenever you create a main menu marker, the program places a button on the disc's title menu. One of the buttons on the title menu should take your viewers to a scenes menu that follows the main menu (if you have a large number of scenes, you'll need to create more than one menu). Setting scene markers creates buttons in the scenes menu.
You can instruct Premiere Elements to insert scene markers automatically (at each video clip or still image within the compilation, or after a time interval that you choose); for easy customization, you can have Premiere Elements automatically generate the markers, and then move these where you want. You can rename them by double-clicking the buttons in the DVD layout. To add scene markers automatically, first click the Timeline window to activate it, and then choose
Stop markers tell the DVD player to stop video playback and return to the main menu. They're useful for adding elements like bonus footage or a slide show. Placing a main menu marker at the start and a stop marker at the end of an element creates a chapter (or stand-alone element) that viewers can watch before being returned to the main menu.
In our soccer DVD, season highlights might be the first choice on the main menu, followed by a slide show, and then perhaps a blooper reel, followed by separate pages containing scenes from the highlights movie. In a simpler structure for the disc, each game might appear as a chapter on the main menu, and we could assign scene markers to make the most dramatic plays appear on the menu's scene pages. Because of space limitations, however, you can't put many buttons on the menus. Premiere Elements generates as many scene menus as necessary to accommodate the markers you've set.
Unfortunately, Premiere Elements won't create menu links to files (such as Word documents or PDFs) that you can't include on its Timeline. But you can get around this deficiency by inserting text in the menus--or in the credits of the movie itself--that alerts the viewer to this material. For example, you might add a line to your main menu that says, "To find additional materials, right-click the DVD icon in My Computer and choose
If you're producing a simpler disc than the one we're creating in our sample project, you can make your video begin to play as soon as the viewer inserts the DVD into the drive. To do this, choose
Step 3: Customize the Appearance of Your DVD
Once you've created the navigation points for your disc, you're ready to add some decorative touches.
Premiere Elements contains 32 menu templates for you to choose from, all of them reachable via the Change Template function in the DVD Layout dialog box. Available themes include travel, business, holidays, weddings, kids' parties, and sports. Each template consists of a main menu of chapters and a submenu for navigating movie scenes.
The Titles button located on the taskbar permits you to change the fonts and colors of your movie's titles and credits, but this feature doesn't work on the DVD menus.
To customize your menu--for example, to swap out its background image in favor of something you like better--use Adobe's Photoshop Elements or any other program that can modify and save .psd files. Your image editor must be able to display and modify the layers in a Photoshop file. You can purchase Photoshop Elements bundled with Premiere Elements for $150; separately, the programs cost $100 each.
Premiere Elements stores menu files in its DVD templates directory, at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Premiere Elements 1.0\DVD Templates. Save a copy of the menu you wish to modify in a directory that you can easily find again; then edit the menu file, and save it in the DVD Templates directory under its old name, so that Premiere Elements will be able to recognize it.
Though Premiere Elements lets you add music to movie and slide-show sound tracks, it doesn't permit you to add background music with menu screens. Rumor has it that the next version of the program, scheduled to be released soon, will include features that address this and other program limitations. Other software packages, such as Pinnacle's Studio 9 and Apple's IDVD for Mac OS X, support menu background music already.
Step 4: Getting Ready to Burn
If your disc will consist entirely of movies and graphics that you can put into the Premiere Elements Timeline, you may burn your DVD directly from the program. But our sample project using Premiere Elements has additional files--the soccer team's roster and league certificate that we set aside earlier in a special folder--so we have to render the project to our hard drive (sometimes called making a disk image) by using the
Make sure that the combination of bonus material and DVD files you want to save to disc doesn't exceed 4.37GB, the storage capacity available on a standard DVD. To determine the total size of the folder in which you've saved your bonus material, right-click the folder and select
To save yourself some time, whether you are using Premiere Elements or a DVD-burning program to make your final disc, take advantage of Premiere Elements' preview feature. You can access this by clicking the DVD icon on the taskbar. Make sure that you're happy with the way the finished disc looks before you start the rendering process.
Both methods of rendering and burning are surprisingly slow. The PC I used (a 2.6-GHz Pentium 4 system carrying 1GB of RAM) took nearly 2 hours to burn a half-hour video. Premiere Elements' manual suggests burning to disc overnight. A tip: Before you get to the burning stage, you can prerender video segments by pressing the
Once you get the hang of Premiere Elements--or any other well-made DVD authoring program--you'll be delighted at how easily you can produce professional-looking, easy-to-play DVDs.
The Living-Room Option: Use a DVD Recorder
PCs are great tools for editing and preparing video for inclusion on a DVD, but component-style DVD burners can be mighty convenient. Some burners can do double duty: archiving TV shows off the cable or satellite set-top box (or TiVo), as well as importing, editing, and archiving camcorder footage.
Many home-theater DVD recorders have front audio and video inputs for quickly attaching an analog camcorder; and some newer models, like Pioneer's DVR-533H-S, also include a FireWire DV input, which--like Premiere Elements on a FireWire-equipped PC--lets you make a digital copy of your footage, thus maintaining its pristine digital quality.
The DVR-533H-S's 80GB hard drive allows you to store and edit down multiple DV tapes for burning onto a single disc.
The $400 recorder includes a few editing functions, too: You can delete scenes and tighten up the timing of shots via the Disc Navigator Screen. But don't expect the level of flexibility you'd have with the PC. You can't customize menus as extensively as with Premiere Elements--or make them as pretty or graphics-rich--and you can't include documents with your video. Also, setting the text of the titles and menus by pressing the Up and Down buttons on the handheld remote is much more laborious than typing the same text on a keyboard.
Edward B. Driscoll, Jr.
