Planning the DVDThe first task of authoring a DVD is planning. This planning can be as minimal as deciding to use a template to organize your family's vacation photos and video, or as robust as using project management software to coordinate a production team creating an interactive kiosk. Whatever the depth of planning, you should develop an understanding of the project's content and how it is to be presented. By the end of the planning stage, you should have a good understanding of the following parameters you'll use to make decisions throughout the authoring process. The intended audience and purpose If the DVD is intended for family and friends, you probably won't need to include copy protection or region coding. If, however, the DVD is intended for mass distribution or contains copyrighted material, you may need to prevent duplication or limit its use to certain regions or countries. The scope If the DVD is a personal gallery of images, then the author alone may be involved. If the DVD is an interactive kiosk, then artists, technicians, and other production team members will probably be involved and you may need to include them in the planning. The types and amount of content to be included In order to make certain decisions, such as disc size and video data rate, you need to know how much content you have to fit on the disc. Small projects that include mostly audio may fit on a CD, while projects containing feature-length movies and vast amounts of supplemental material may require a dual-layer or double-sided DVD. (See Understanding bit budgeting) The navigation scheme A well-produced DVD employs a hierarchy of navigation that gives the viewer clear and easy access to the content. The intended playback environment If the DVD will be accessed only on a computer (via the desktop), you can include types of content that a television DVD player cannot access. For example, if you want to archive a collection of PDFs, the PDFs would be viewable only on a computer with Adobe Acrobat Reader installed (or included on the DVD) and not on a television monitor connected to a DVD player. |