Will any of you burn my pte show to DVD?

[fuzzy]

I have a 760 slide show (a teaching program), with voiceovers that connect to each slide. It's a manual advance show, but I assume I'll have to make it an automatically advancing show and time each slide to the length of the voiceover file.

1) With 1024x768 jpgs and mp3 files, it's a 490 Meg pte slide show. I haven't timed it exactly, but with all the voiceovers, it could come to about three hours. Will this fit on a DVD?

2) I have no clue on the whole DVD situation, and have enough headaches in my life. Is there anyone whom I could send this to and could make a DVD for me? (Of course I'd pay for this service).

3) This is an education program for photographers. I don't know if it should be created in + or - format. Should it be done in both so that there won't be any issues about compatibility?

TIA

Fuzzy Duenkel

[nickles]

Hello Fuzzy:

I hate to see a guy left dangling. I've been watching your post thinking that some one more knowledgable than myself would respond. I guess not. I think the enormity of your slideshow has made people a little nervous about responding.

I am not a professional, which may be what you need...but I'm going to try to answer one or two of your questions, make some general comments and suggestions, and ask you a few questions.

1.) Is your ultimate goal to produce a DVD that you desire to mass produce or is this a small onesy-twoesy situation?

2.) Do you have a basic understanding of a DVD's structure and creation? Do you know what is meant by Authoring a DVD? Root Menu? Chapters? Scene selection?

3.) There are two basic types of DVDs in common use. The kind you buy or rent at the local video store are professionaly made on a DVD Rom media that normally are dual layered and normally have a capacity of around 10 gigabytes. The equipment required to burn these DVD's is fairly expensive and would normally be available only at a professional video studio. The other type of DVD is the kind you buy at a local computer store. These are normally referred to as DVD -R, +R, -RW, and +RW. These are the kind normally used by computer/video hobbyists such as myself and have approximately 1/2 the capacity of DVD Roms (4.7 gigabytes). The DVD R burners are relative inexpensive. DVD Roms will play on all DVD players, newer DVD players will also play the DVD Rs, older DVD players may or may not play DVD Rs. I consider the DVD Roms to be the more reliable media. I own three different brands of DVD players, all three will play DVD -R and +R. Two will play DVD+RW but not DVD-RW. The other will play DVD-RW but not DVD+RW. If you intend to mass produce and market, you should seriously consider discussing this project with a professional video studio that has the ability to burn the more reliable and larger capacity DVD Roms.

4.) If you intend to go the onesy-twosey route I suggest burning both DVD +R and -R. The cost of the media is relatively inexpensive. I've made several DVDs that contain multiple PTE slideshows. A DVD uses a highly compressed video format referred to as MPEG-2. The person that creates the MPEG-2 varies the extent of compression. This compression is comparable to JPEG compression in photography. You can make a highly compressed JPEG photo but the picture quality will suffer proportionately. I have found that with PTE slideshows a compression that permits around 1 and 1/2 hours on a single DVD yields very good results. A three hour slideshow would require at least two DVDs.

5.) I would suggest that you break your slideshow up into 8 or 10 individual slideshows. These could be individual photography lessons. On a DVD these lessons would become Chapters of the video. These Chapters or lessons would be selectable by the user from the DVDs Root Menu. The Chapters or lessons can be further broken up into scenes. A standard DVD player will play an entire Chapter and then return to the Root Menu to permit the user to select the next Chapter with the DVDs remote.

6.) The individual slideshows that you produce with PTE should play non-stop with no pause buttons. On a DVD the user pauses the video and goes to the next scene.

7.) An example of a Root Menu that I used for one of my personal multi-slideshow DVDs can be seen here:

Example of Root Menu

Of course in your PTE project the thumbnails would be related to a specific Photography Lesson.

8.) Would your DVD need to be NTSC or PAL?

9.) I suggest making a short slideshow, and have a DVD created of the slidshow to ascertain the resulting quality before doing the entire project. In the photo world people are often disappointed with the quality of photos that are displayed on a television. TVs just don't have near the resolution of a PC monitor

I think I've said enough for now. I hope this helps and does not confuse. I will be watching for any questions you have concerning this post.

KEN

[fuzzy]

Thanks so much for responding. The problem is I am almost completely in the dark regarding video.

I anticipate about 10-20 DVD burns at various times during a year, or even one at a time.

I use DVD+R discs for data storage, but have never created a DVD video. What I think I should do is purchase the Ulead software to burn the DVD so I can do as you suggested.... experiment.

I've held off because of all the posts here saying that the newest versions of Ulead haven't been working. There's nothing more frustrating than to buy software that is supposed to do the job, and then it doesn't. It's not like we can take it back to the store!!!

I'm not clear on chapters, and scenes, and have no idea what you mean by authoring, and root menu.

Let me ask you this... should I buy Ulead DVD Factory 3? Will it work correctly? Does the specific DVD burner have any effect on the success of the burn?

(I have a DEll with an NEC 1100A that burns DVD+R discs).

Thank you for your help.

Fuzzy

[nickles]

I'm sure you visited Ken Cox's, "How to Prepare and Burn a DVD" in this forum, If not spend some time there.

It's been a couple of years since I used ULEAD (several versions ago) but I know I wasn't very impressed but I suspect that they've made improvements.

About 3 months ago I made the following post:

MY PTE to DVD Method

I know that method has worked great for me.

DVD Lab mentioned in that post has a thirty day trial download. It's a little complicated to use at first but has excellent help and once you figure it out it's very simple to use. It also provides more flexibility for the user than any of the software I've tested. It requires a MPEG-2 encoder. I think they market a version of tmpgenc that also has a trial period. It has excellent help and their site is full of excellent tutorials and faqs.

A cheap alternative is NERO Burning Rom 6. I used to use ROXIO but quickly threw it in the trash can when I evaluated NERO. It does it all and has a very good MPEG-2 encoder. It also has many other video goodies. I normally use NERO to burn my DVDs and CDs although DVD Lab will also burn them. It also has a nice feature called RECODE that permits you to re-encode a 10gig commercial DVD ROM to fit on a 4.7 gig DVD R. I'm pretty sure you can use it under a 30 day trial. I think it costs around $70. I have used it to sucessfully create and burn PTE DVD slideshows...but although their encoder is very good it is also very slow. Their help is not near as excellent as DVD LAB. Their site is here:

NERO Burning ROM

I would suggest you download the trial versions of these and try making a small slideshow on a DVD+RW with your NEC 1100a...just to get a little experience.

Another excellent site that is a must to visit is:

VideoHelp

Wish you success...and will watch for additional posts.

.....ken

[fuzzy]

Thanks for the replies. I'm sorry but this is looking way too complicated for me. I don't understand most of this stuff, and I don't learn very well from reading posts with terms I have no clue about.

I was hoping there would be a program that would do it easily.

I'll just put this idea on hold until I can do it with someone who can walk me though it in-person.

Thanks again for all your help.

Fuzzy

[Dusty]

I hope you haven't given up yet. Your project is possible without too much headache I believe. I use Nova Development's "Video Explosion Deluxe". Their website is Nova Development. I've been very satisfied with this program as it is easy to use. (I also have enough headaches in my life!) I couldn't find the other programs mentioned on this forum locally (middle of nowhere) and was wary of buying something online I couldn't return. The Video Explosion will convert to an MPG2. Open the avi file in the program, the click file>make movie>write movie to file on disk(goes onto your hardrive)>next>mpg2,DVD NTSC-better,>(uncheck fast video resizing)>next (and it will convert the AVI file to the mpg format.) Then open MY DVD which came packaged with Video Explosion. It's all very simple really (if I can do it anyone can!!!) All the files you open will be added as a new movie and included on the DVD. You can use their chapter templates (it doesn't matter because this isn't the final stage for what you are trying to do). Burn as many disks as you need until your project is all onto DVDs.

Now, this is expensive but well worth the investment. You will need a DVD recorder/player that will hook up to your TV. I use a Panasonic DVD Video Recorder DMR-E8OH. It cost me about $700 just a few months ago. It has a hard drive (60Gigs I think) that will store a LOT of movies. Put your movies onto the hard drive (HDD) and separate them into chapters. Name them. Then burn them (they call it dubbing) all onto one disk. The machine has a wonderful compression system that will make up to 6 hours of video fit onto one disk and the quality is amazing! It will only compress it to what is needed to make it fit. It will need to be finalized but after that it will play on the majority of DVD players.

I'm sure there are other options online but I'm with you, they are complicated.

We bought the Panasonic for recording movies off the satellite but it has turned out to be a very useful tool for other projects as well. I'd be happy to help you, though, if you don't want to invest in the recorder.

~Cindy