I have a nice quality DVD burner but even when I burn DVDs there are still some DVD players that can't play them. I have a feature film over 90 minutes that I have to have DVDs of asap in order to make the November 15th deadline for a festival.

What should I do? Should I have it professionally compressed and burned? If so, where? I could use quite a few copies for different festivals and viewings. I have main concepts encoder and when I use it in adobe premiere it works great, but when I use it to create a standalone file using the bit calculator it looks like garbage. :-/

you need to export to DLT tape. then give to a replicaton co. like disk makers.

if u want it compatible for all dvd players.

Are you trying to put a whole hour and a half on one disk? That will not lend good quality. As mentioned above, you could export to DLT, but I'm betting you don't have a DLT recorder. Export it to MiniDV and look for a house that can make it for you from there. They can transfer it to DLT.

Mike

I don't think I have enough time to do that. Could I take it to a place in Dallas or somewhere within driving distance and give it on a portable harddrive and have it professionally burned?

Could a production house professionally burn it? What do I need to ask to make sure they can do the right thing and aren't just going to burn a DVD no better than I can do on my computer?

Is there a dvd burner I could buy that would be compatible for any DVD player that plays burned DVDs (in other words, doesn't pause up halfway through playing it, but still wouldn't play on older DVD players that just don't play any burned DVDs)?

I don't think I have enough time to do that. Could I take it to a place in Dallas or somewhere within driving distance and give it on a portable harddrive and have it professionally burned?

Could a production house professionally burn it? What do I need to ask to make sure they can do the right thing and aren't just going to burn a DVD no better than I can do on my computer?

Is there a dvd burner I could buy that would be compatible for any DVD player that plays burned DVDs (in other words, doesn't pause up halfway through playing it, but still wouldn't play on older DVD players that just don't play any burned DVDs)?

I am a little confused. You said you had until Nov. 15th, right? That's about 3 weeks. It takes 1 1/2 hours to output it to a MiniDV tape. Call a replicator and see if they can do it. It will cost you plenty to have them pressed.

If the quality is not as important as being able to play in more machines, get a newer burner and burn to DVD-R. I think that would be the best disk, but others may know more about that. I have had no issues with DVD-R's in any player.

I would think that the festivals would have good players!

Mike

You would think that! lol Oddly enough, that doesn't seem to be the case. They don't have DVD players that just can't play burned disks, but they do have DVD players that struggle with some discs.

The quality of the discs I've burned is fine for judging copies.

Here's the real problem. There are a couple of spots in the movie where some DVD players sieze up. It seems to be fairly consistent at those spots and many players have trouble (none of mine do though). Is this a burning issue or could this be an encoding/main concept issue? You'd think that since it only has trouble on certain dvd players that it wouldn't be an encoding problem.

P.S. The deadline is Nov 15th, but I need to have it mailed in about a week!

What media are you using?

M

I'm using dvd -r

anything you can burn will have a failure rate of 10% (85 to 90% is roughly the compatibility of DVD-R with the DVD player market).
it does not matter if it is burned by you or a professional.
there is another 10% failure that depends on how your DVD is made.
many problems can surface either on the way it is burned, or the way it is authored. Most problems come from too high bandwith, or deviance from the mpeg2 standard for DVD (that is different than plain mpeg2).
The advantage to go with a professional is the availability of these tests (you should absolutely ask for the reports as proof of good work else you better had to ask the kid next door).
see http://www.dvdverification.com/public/157.cfm

physically you can check for the medium and the data written on it and logically , there are programs than can give you a report of how well your DVD complies with DVD standard.
Ahead (nero) Liteon(Kprobe) and Philips(DVD-Verifier) are providing some tools , some for free, some very expensive.
http://www.ip.philips.com/licensing/services/lover/h/documents1051.html
but the utimate way to get a 99% compatible DVD is to have it industrially made (stamped and not burned). even there, these tests are usefull.
You do not need the test each time. Once you found the correct workflow, you can give up with the tests.

unfortunately this is very expensive, and unless your target is several hundred of copies, that not a game to play.

Currently Nero and RecordNow are the best programs to burn a DVD-R.
to encode, cinemacraft is very high quality
to author, i would use something like DVDMaestro or Scenarist, a pretty old but rock solid application.
programs that do "all-in-one" from avi to DVD are usually poor performers.

Apple has pretty good tools too.

And if you use a good (ritek G05, tayo hyunden, verbatim) 8x media burned at 4X , you can bet that your DVD-R will play in any player.
since media are sensitive to the burner, you better have to make sure they match.
http://www.videohelp.com/dvdmedia?dvdmediasearch=&dvdmediadvdridsearch=&type=1&size=4.7&dvdburnspeed=All&order=Name&hits=50&search=Search+or+List+Media
some good disk on some good burner simply do not match well and give poor results.
pioneer and plextor are known to build good burners, most of the other brand names are usually just rebadged Liteon drives.(nothing wrong here since Liteon produce some good drives, they just cheaper if you buy directly a Liteon, instead an HP or SONY)

I sell instructional dvds. I do everything from a home based business. I have sold at least 500 dvds that I have burnt using my editing computer. I had about 10 of the first hundred returned with problems. I changed brands of media, as well as dvd burner, and fixed an incompatibility issue. I have had one complaint in the last 400 discs. I do burn and compare, I sometimes catch defective discs that way, but no complaints from customers. I started with a sony burner, I found out they have a large incompatibility issue with most brands. I switched to a good plextor, and I use ridata discs. yes, most replication houses burn discs if the order is under a thousand discs. yes, burning can be kept at a much higher than 90% fail rate. I recently moved up to a robotic burner, I've had no problems in the first 100 discs I have burnt with it.

P.S I never burn faster than 4x, error rate goes way up faster than that. I buy either 8x or 16x media

When I did a DVD compability test here in Sweden - using like 10 DVD players, my conclusion was that DVD +R plays better than -R. I know that it goes against what has been said earlier, but for me DVD+R has worked 100%.

// Lazze

Same here with booktype set to DVD-ROM - fools players to think it's a pressed DVD.

Hi

I am not sure exactly what you need, we are located in Pittsburgh and can hardware encode mpeg2 and author using Sonic Scenarist. We can output to DLT if you are going for replication. 90 minutes with hardware encoding is very good, we have not seen the same performance from software encoders.

If you just need a disc burned I would recommend picking up a Plextor sata drive, we have had great success with a 755 series.

Thanks

Chuck Wall
www.dvdpa.com