Review of DVD Home Moviemaking, A Beginner`s Guide

Introduction

This is a rather dry but informative hour-long introduction to DVD home moviemaking. Aimed at an American audience, but no less valid for anybody else, the disc concentrates on the authoring side of the process rather than the filming and editing side.

Because of the sheer variety of hardware and software available for making digital home movies, no attempt is made at hand-holding as the disc takes you through eight short chapters on preparation, filming, editing, encoding, authoring and burning.

An awful lot of technical terms and figures are thrown out during the lecture, so the replayability of DVD really comes into its own. Particularly repeatable are the descriptions of DVD formats and bitrate calculations. There is also a slightly simplistic piece on aspect ratios that should shut up the "no black bars" brigade.

Popping the disc in your DVD-ROM drive presents you with a Macromedia presentation menu of the ROM content of the disc. This comprises various utilities as the bitrate calculator, templates and backgrounds that can be used with the packaged trial version software by Sonic which includes MyDVD and DVDIt!

Video

Made and presented in standard 4:3 NTSC, some players may have difficulties with this disc, although it is regionless.

Audio

The sound is in DD2.0 Stereo, but is only the lecturer`s voice so what more would you want?

Features

Included on the disc are checklists, a glossary and in DVD-ROM content helpful bits and pieces including trial versions of MyDVD and DVDIt!, and a "bit budget" calculator which helps you work out the size on the final disc of your epic masterpiece.

There are no subtitles or closed captions.

Conclusion

Not a bad basic introduction to DVD making, but IMHO you might be better off buying a similarly titled book as it`s a lot of information to assimilate in an hour and even then it`s not in that much depth.