Desktop DVD Authoring
Douglas Dixon, Jim MateyOverview
"With this book, you can easily create and share great-looking productions on DVD and even CD, with real, full-quality digital video and audio, complete with professional-style menus. Even better, the DVD discs that you burn at your desktop can be played almost anywhere - not only on computer DVD drives, but also on consumer set-top DVD players." This book will help you make sense of DVD - discs and formats, consumer and computer products, computer systems and peripherals, for playback and authoring, across both the Windows and Macintosh platforms. You'll see the range of possibilities for desktop DVD authoring, from transferring some videotapes to DVD as easily and simply as possible, to designing your own interactive presentations.Synopsis
"With this book, you can easily create and share great-looking productions on DVD and even CD, with real, full-quality digital video and audio, complete with professional-style menus. Even better, the DVD discs that you burn at your desktop can be played almost anywhere - not only on computer DVD drives, but also on consumer set-top DVD players." This book will help you make sense of DVD - discs and formats, consumer and computer products, computer systems and peripherals, for playback and authoring, across both the Windows and Macintosh platforms. You'll see the range of possibilities for desktop DVD authoring, from transferring some videotapes to DVD as easily and simply as possible, to designing your own interactive presentations.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewWith DVD recorders and media plummeting in price, thousands of people are authoring DVDs for the first time. Whether you’re archiving old home-movie videotapes, creating multimedia business presentations, or simply backing up data, Desktop DVD Authoring teaches you how to do it right.
Douglas Dixon offers detailed coverage of both Windows and Mac platforms, and all you need to know to navigate through today’s confusing range of products, formats, and standards. Next, he walks through playback and takes you under the hood with a typical DVD, showing exactly how it’s laid out.
Dixon organizes the rest of the book around three categories of DVD authoring tools. The first are simple, automated tools like CyberLink PowerDirector and InterVideo WinProducer, combining video editing, movie file creation, and basic DVD authoring. The second are “personal” packages such as Apple’s iDVD and Sonic DVDit! for Windows, each designed to support importing clips and customizing simple menu layouts -- but offering no built-in video capture and few editing features.
Finally, Dixon turns to more complex “professional” packages that uncover virtually all the power built into the DVD format, notably Apple’s DVD Studio Pro and Sonic’s ReelDVD. If you want to create fancy menus, multiple subtitle streams, or, for that matter, wide-screen programs with Dolby Digital audio, these packages are right up your alley.
The book’s appendices neatly assemble additional information serious DVD authors will need: technical summaries, glossaries, online resources, and a catalogue of tools for playback, editing, and authoring alike. Bill Camarda
Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.