[MacDV] Re: Moving into DVD- Help!!!--MacDV Digest #2434

[Gerhard Kuhn]

I have made a lot of DVDs successfully and I think the secret is 
patients.  iDVD running on a G4 iMac with a superdrive does a fine job 
of it.  When you finish your project and have tweaked it to your hearts 
content leave things be until iDVD has finished encoding the project.  
Make sure that all energy saving features have been turned off since 
they will interfere with the progress of the encoding.  Now when you 
rise in the morning rested and iDVD has slaved away encoding your 
project it is time to press the burn button and insert a disk.  In an 
hour or less you will have a recorded disk that should play on most DVD 
players.  If iDVD does not have features that you need from DVD Studio 
Pro then by all means upgrade but iDVD will do a great job of authoring 
DVDs with little fuss and very good results.

 From what I have heard most problems are encountered when the burn 
button is pressed before the encoding is finished so just be patient 
and hope that you don't have a power failure.  I know that I stand 
somewhat alone on this last point but it has been my experience that 
the cost of the media has little influence on the playability of the 
final disk.  My experience has been if a set-top player has trouble 
playing -R disks the brand of the disk makes little/no difference.  One 
disk I made using Ritek media had audio issues played on a cheap 
set-top player and a copy burned to Imation media of the same project 
ran better but not perfect.

Gerhard