DVD authoring is the process of creating a disc to be played on a DVD player; there are certain specifications for this which were set out by the DVD forum in 1995. With the advancement in technology, you can now author DVDs on your home computer by purchasing software provided by a variety of well known brands, such as Apple iDVD, WinDVD and Sonic MyDVD to name a few. Whether you just want to put home videos on the disc or if it’s for a short film you’ve created, you want your DVD to look as professional as possible.

On DVDs that we have at home, there are always menus that allow you to alter the setup of the DVD; you have the option of turning the subtitles on, having a commentary or changing the language on the film. While you may not want to have the option of listening to your film in Spanish, you can make your film look genuinely professional by having a main menu page. You can make your menu as simple or as complex as possible as you desire; if you choose to go for a more complex design, use a checkbox method to highlight choices to make it easier for your viewer to know what options they have selected.

It’s important to have created menus for all the different outcomes that may occur through your viewer selecting different settings. In order to do this, you should first make your default options menu as complete as possible, and then you will need to right click on the menu and select the cloning option. While doing this, you will need to uncheck the ‘Position and Size Cloning’ box otherwise every time you select a different option to alter the outcome of one menu, it will be changed on all of the other menus as well. After doing this you’ll be able to make menus for all of the different outcomes from your menu selection.

Another particularly common feature that people want to have on the DVDs that they make is chapter selection. Some computers will create chapters automatically, but often these will not be in the places that we want them to be, creating your own chapters is straightforward. Once you’ve imported your film to your computer, switch the program to ‘Advanced’. Select a point in the preview where you want to insert a chapter, right click and select ‘Split Here’; it’s important to remember that the frame that is in the preview will go into the second part of the split. This will create a new cell in all of the affected program chains (PGC), select the new cell in the PGC window, right click and select ‘Insert Program’.

For almost all DVD players, just doing this is probably enough to stop at the selected point when using the ‘next’ and ‘previous’ buttons on your remote. If you’d rather be able to select the different chapters in your film by selecting the chapter number on the main menu, then go to the title for where you have inserted the program and select the chapter which points to the new one you have created, right click and insert the chapter. Then you simply need to select the newly created program in the popup dialog box that will appear.

Dominic Donaldson is a technology expert.
Find out more about DVD Authoring and other ways to enhance your home cinema experience.