DVD Authoring and Duplication

I refer to them as Generic and Authored DVDs. Both DVDs will produce video material up to 6 hours long that play on almost all stand alone DVD players of recent vintage.

Generic DVDs basically are played into a real time DVD recorder and burned one at a time. I call them Generic because they don't have a title page of any quality, but for those of you that just want to put your material onto a digital format and don't care about aesthetic title pages, this may be what you want.

Authored DVDs are created on a software program in the computer and allows me to produce either a moving or still background for the title page with appropriate sound tracks and chapters with titles that allow you to navigate menus and specific times in the program. These chapters can be looped (repeated) to increase learning a specific topic or skill.

The idea of putting labels on DVDs as you would onto CDs is controversial because the speed of DVDs is so much faster. Thus any label imbalance or loss of grip could cause the DVD to play back improperly if at all.

Our solution is to have printable DVDs that we can run into our DVD inkjet printer. This allows us to create objects that are appealing to look at and that have 2 hours of visual entertainment (six hours possible). We then place them in either clear cover boxes to allow the pictured DVDs to display their beauty, or in DVD cases that have the similar images on the box.

This way DVDs become the perfect marriage of still and moving objects.

The process of authoring and printing takes longer than just feeding the info into a stand alone recorder and hence costs more. It is not the looks but the control and ease of use that makes it well worth any extra expense.