When I got my Lacie DVD RW for my iMac, I went through a bit of baptism of fire with the burner, DVD Studio Pro and also Toast 5. So I thought I’d pass on some of the things that I’ve learned in the hope that somebody might find this info useful.
DVD-R, Toast 5 and Lacie DVD RW
First off, Mac’s like DVD-R. So you might think you rush out and get a load of these disks to use when burning DVD’s with Toast 5. Don’t do it. After some correspondence on the Toast message forum it turns out that you will constantly get buffer under run errors if you use DVD-R. Use DVD+R. These will burn fine with your Lacie burner. BUT it aint that simple. DVD+R disks do not show up in the Mac finder. DVD+R are fine for playing in DVD players but if you want to burn a DVD disk for use in your Mac use DVD+RW. It’s weird but these burn fine and play fine in your Mac!
DVD Studio Pro 1.5 and Slideshows
Creating photo slideshows in DVD Studio Pro 1.5 is a pain in the arse. It only accepts PICT or PSD format when most photos you have are probably stored as JPEG. Well a much easier way to create a slideshow is export a QuickTime movie of your pics using iPhoto. In iPhoto choose the album you want to use and goto File>Export. Click the QuickTime tab and set the size to 720 x 576 for PAL (or use the NTSC size). Set your time for each photo, background colour or optional background image. Then just click Export. iPhoto will then export a QuickTime movie complete with background music (if selected) and fades between each photo. You then just treat the movie as any other to get it into DVD Studio Pro.
DVD Symbols
A full set of DVD symbols can be found in a specialist font called Combi Symbols DVD available from myfonts.com.
Not all players are the same
Try and test your media on as many DVD players as you can before you settle on a brand. Some brands play better on more players that others. For example I tried a disk on my PS2. All worked fine. Then I tried it on my Dad’s PS2 and it wouldn’t play! Just part of the fun / nightmare that is DVD authoring!
CAPTY DVD
Lets say you have an m2v file and corresponding aif that you want to use in Capty DVD, the DVD creation software that ships with the Lacie burner. What you need to do is merge the audio with the video. To do this you need to multiplex using something like BitVice Helper, which will then turn those files into one mp2 file.
QuickTime Pro
Make sure you upgrade to the Pro version of Quicktime. A friend of mine calls it the Swiss Army knife of video software - brilliant for converting between file formats, exporting sound etc. And now with the new MPEG-2 Playback Component you can also use MPEG-2 movies.
If what you’re saying is correct am I better off just using ‘Disc Burn Utility’ for using DVD-R? This whole +r / -r is so damned confusing!
Manrilla / 22/11/2003