Getting started with DVD Studio Pro

[Carter Tomassi]

Lots of talk on the last digest about DVD. I just started reading the 
DVD Studio Pro manual and so far the first 50 pages have only talked 
about DVD technology in general. One of the things they recommend is 
putting the video and audio files that are created on different hard 
drives, if possible, and not having anything else on the drives. I 
supposed this is done after the programming is finished and you have 
a Video_TS and an Audio_TS (TS = title set.) Then they suggest still 
another drive for the finished files. They must be talking about 
long, menu-heavy projects.

They also make the point that the more assets the project has the 
lower the overall quality. And they go through explaining how to 
figure out your bit rate based on your video, audio, stills, and 
menus. But basically when burning your own disks you are limited to 
DVD-5 or 4.37 real Gigs. So Studio Pro probably won't be much help in 
making a longer playing DVD.

Now I have seen a friend burn just fine with one drive on a G4. But 
it was only about 10 minutes of assets. And when he had that disk 
mass duplicated artifacts started showing up at the end of shots 
where he faded to black.

I think the best method of approaching this is to keep it simple at 
first and gradually add more to your projects until you hit the 
breaking point when the images are no longer acceptable.

That's my $.02,
Carter