Do you burn DVD's in a separate program?

[Jonathan Jones]

Part of the benefit of creating the disk images first is that they are also easy to archive the completed DVD project. All the content and the finished interface is self contained and ready to burn new discs any time. Some DVD authoring applications act in part as referencing mechanisms, dynamically resourcing the source content to generate the DVD file. This may include content that could be coming from a variety of source locations - different drives, stock libraries, and application cache files.

In some cases, should those source files be changed in content or location, it could throw off the reference path for that DVD file, sometimes resulting in corrupted assets, sometimes compromising the ability to make new, identical DVDs for that project.

A well managed process usually allows for automatic updating when source files and assets are changed, but this doesn't always work as planned.

A down-side is that changes can't really be made to the disk image, so things like alterations to the interface menus, or re-naming chapter markers, etc. can no longer be done unless the user has retained the disc authoring file. But I tend to retain archives of all my disk images, and toss out the authoring files after a set time when I know that the project is as complete as it will ever get. Every so often, a past client will show up and ask for a few new copies of an old project we had put onto DVD some time in the past. In fact this happened just two days ago for a DVD project that was completed a couple of years ago. I had the disk image and related label files in my archive, and was able to generate a brand new disc, and print the label to it all in identical to the earlier ones, and hand it to him in about 10 minutes.

-Jon

[Jonathan Jones]

Originally Posted by Kevin Lewis

I'm looking for a separate program which might help decrease the number of incompatible burns.

There are certainly some additional potential fail-points to be aware of that are not necessarily related to the application you are using. Chief among them is the quality and integrity of the blanks you are using.

As far as I know, most common with failed burns or incompatibility problems is cheap, low-grade or otherwise inferior media.

Another problem -though not as common- is the performance of the system you are using to burn with. A few years ago, a friend of mine was pulling his hair out trying to burn a DVD but was getting errors and failed burns with each attempt. We started to trouble-shoot his entire workflow, his blanks, and his burner. After making sure that his burner and the blanks were fine, the main is with file structures in such disparate condition that it really took its toll when trying to manage a 4 GB DVD project file.

After he defragmented his drive, his DVDs burned fine and he had no such problems afterwards.

-Jon