How much material will fit on a DVD is determined by a few different factors.

1. There are many different types of DVDs that hold various amounts of information. The two most common types are DVD-5 and DVD-9.
   DVD-5 has a 4.37gig capacity
   DVD-9 has a 7.54gig capacity
   Obviously, more capacity equals more material.
   
2. The encoding quality of both video and the audio. High quality encoding requires more space.
   Can you fit 2 hours of video on a DVD-5? Yes.
   Will it look like a Hollywood DVD? No.
   In order to fit 2 hours of video on a DVD-5, both the video and audio quality will have to be on the low end of the spectrum.
   
   If you have over an hour and twenty minutes or so and you want your project to look great, you need to have it encoded and authored for DVD-9.
   The down side of DVD-9 is that it costs considerably more to manufacture.
   Also, DVD-9 has 2 layers of information (DVD-5 has a single layer) and sometimes, players will pause or freeze briefly while switching between layers.
   

There are five types of audio that can be on a DVD: PCM, Dolby Digital (AC3), MPEG Audio, DTS (Digital Theater System) and SDDS (Sony Dynamic Digital Sound).

PCM audio and Dolby Digital(AC3) are the only universally compatible types of audio for DVD. That is, they work worldwide on every player.

MPEG Audio is compatible with most newer models but is not universal.

DTS playback requires special hardware and SDDS is a new 7.1 surround developed for theaters and no current systems support it.

DVDs can have up to 32 different subtitle tracks.

You will need to supply us with time code specifying in and out points for your subtitles.

Most professional DVDs that you see have been color corrected. All Hollywood movies have been, that's for sure and these corrections are separate from the corrections that have been done for the theatrical release because DVD has its own set of concerns.

The main issue is that DVDs are a digital medium that are, for the most part, viewed on analog equipment, television. Televisions (NTSC monitors) can't handle the same black levels as digital (black= 0 IRE). Anything that is to be released specifically for NTSC monitors are adjusted to broadcast safe levels (black= 7.5 IRE). Well, DVDs are not exclusively viewed on analog equipment, they are viewed digitally as well and will be increasingly so as digital television and HDTV become standard. If you adjust your DVD to be broadcast safe, it will look terrible on anything but NTSC monitors and no one wants that. At the same time, while NTSC monitors are still standard, you want your DVD to look great on there too and not have your footage be too dark; the blacks crushed.

Concerns with white levels are different, yet similar. Digital white = 255 and broadcast safe = 235. You don't want your footage looking blown out on an NTSC monitor or muted and dull in the digital world.

Quite a dilemma. What's the answer? Adjusting both the black levels and white levels to be acceptable in both the digital and analog worlds. The simplified version of how this is done is to leave the black level peaks at 0 but move the mid tones towards white. For the white levels, push the saturation of the whites up without blowing out them out. More of a glow than blown out.

As far as overall color correction goes, we highly recommend color correcting your project. It's truly unbelievable what a difference it makes. Most everything that you see has been color corrected and there is a reason for it.

Copy protection is a big concern. No one wants people to be able to make perfect digital copies of their product.

There are two main types of copy protection for DVDs: CSS and Macrovision.

CSS is digital copy protection making it so that people cannot put your DVD in their computer and copy it. It does this by using an encryption key and basically marries the content to the actual disc. The information separate from the disc is useless.

Macrovision is scrambles the analog signal so that you cannot copy a DVD by taking the signal out of the analog outputs such as to a VCR, set top box DVD recorder, or analog capture into a computer.

Whether you want to employ these technologies is wholly up to you. Some things to consider:

• Anyone who wants to copy the DVD still can. There are cracks for CSS. It does prevent people who are less tech savvy or who don't care to put in the effort to figure out how to do it but, again, if anyone really wants to copy your DVD, they can do it.
• If you are putting out a DVD on the 1000-10000 piece level, you may want to just think of it as promotion. If your DVD gets copied and passed along, it could actually help your cause in the end. More people know who you are, like your work and are interested in what you do next. Then, when you are in high demand, you can worry about copy protection.

CSS is a one time flat cost of around $250 depending on the repliacation facility.

Macrovision is both a flat cost of around $250 plus per piece licensing from Macrovision the cost of which depends on how many pieces you are doing.

Yes, you can. Of course, this only works on computers and the user has to have this kind of access turned on in their software DVD player and they might even have to download files to be able to access this feature.

The best option for web links is to make a Hybrid DVD.

Hybrid DVDs are two-part DVDs:

1. A standard DVD-Video just like the ones you rent at the video store
2. A DVD-ROM portion that is the equivalent of a CD-ROM and it can have anything on it that a CD-ROM can have including software, games, links to websites, photo galleries, etc.

We use Macromedia Director to create the DVD-ROM portion of a hybrid DVD or for straight up DVD-ROMs.

Yes, of course you do.

Nothing is done until you say it is and are completely satisfied with it. That being said, there are some limitations that we expect you to be aware of and understand.

• DVD-Rs are often flawed and can have little glitches on them like freezing for a second. All we have to do is insure that its the DVD-R that is at fault and not the authoring. If your proof is freezing, chances are it's the DVD-R. If there is a different kind of glitch, we need to make sure that it's not in the authoring. Even if your DVD-R proof has these little glitches on it, your DLT will not which is part of the reason why DLTs are the industry standard for DVD masters submitted to a replication house.
• If you are making a DVD-9, there is no way to burn that to a DVD-R. It simply won't fit. There are a few options to deal with this:
  
  1. We send you a proof version of your DVD with a lower compression rate so that it fits on a DVD-R so you can see the design, menus and functionality of your DVD and you just have to trust that your footage looks great.
  2. We send you an external hard drive with the build of the DVD on it and you use your computer DVD player to play the DVD right off the drive.
  3. You come to us and watch it at the source, where it all happens, at StamenMedia!

DLTs are the industry standard for DVD masters because they rarely have any data errors. DVD-Rs on the other hand, have a 25% failure rate. Even if it plays fine when you test it out, that doesn't mean that it won't fail. The replication houses analyze the data and are unforgiving when it comes to little errors, if it detects any, your DVD-R fails and they won't replicate it. You can certainly take your chances and have multiple burns ready to go. Failing DVD-Rs can really mess up your timeline if you are on one.

If you are making a DVD-9, then you have no choice but to use DLTs.

Yes, we sure can.

The best method is for you to send us an external hard drive with your DVD build on it and we can create the DLT Master from that.

If you don't have an external drive or we have to do it another way, contact us and we'll figure it out.