DV for Teachers

A very handy hint from Ken Stone , to make copy or so-called ‘image’ of your completed DVD for thorough testing before burning to DVD media.

In DVD Studio Pro and iDVD we can preview or simulate our DVD… as there is the opportunity to catch errors early on, but just because the DVD seems to work properly in simulation, you can still burn coasters. This is where the disc image comes in, as a disc image is the finished product, and can be tested in the Apple DVD Player. This is a real world test of your finished DVD and is much more accurate way to test.

SmartHouse News offers How To Turn Your Mac Into A Home Theatre System, 7 pages of links to multimedia software, much of it free, for using a Mac to control, store, and playback recordings for a home theater system. They provide little in the way of how-tos, but there are many apps here I was unaware of. For example, programs that work with TiVo® or other hard-drive-based digital video recorder devices. Lots here.

Why on DV for Teachers? Why not? An inexpensive set of choices for bringing more kinds of media to the classroom is a good thing, especially when it puts the power of choice in your hands.

Ken Stone has posted a thorough look at Authoring in iDVD 6, with dozens upon dozens of screenshots to explain new features and capabilities. From his conclusion:

iDVD 6 is filled with new features [....] The best news of all, it just works.

I love hearing that.

The paper cd case site will

...create a PDF file which can be printed and folded to create a paper CD case. For folding directions, see the about section. To add more tracks, a mailing address, or graphics to the case, use the advanced form. Mix CD cases created with the advanced form can be optionally added to our public mix CD database. To create a case for an existing CD, use our CD search engine to find the CD and it will fill in this form for you. Jewel case inserts can also be created.

Why not use this for your DVDs, QuickTime video CDs, backed up movie trailers, or even document backups as well?

Ken Stone, in Building Custom Presets in Compressor 2:

As I often burn DVDs that are 60 minutes or less, I want to have a special preset for this duration. Because 60 minutes of video takes up less space on a DVD than 90 minute of video, I want to devote this extra space to my video encode (higher bit rate setting), to increase the quality a little bit more. It is possible to build a custom preset from scratch in the Preset window but it is easier to select a preset that is close to what you want, modify the preset for your specific needs and then Name and Save the preset for future use.

I like this tutorial for two main reasons. First, I often encode less than 60 minutes to a DVD, and this will help me do it with the best possible quality. Second, this step-by-step helps make sense of the not-too friendly Compressor interface for making other custom presets.

Kevin Schmitt reviews Toast 7 Titanium – we’re upgrading the labs here to it.

Toast 7 Titanium packs a host of very useful new features and improvements that continue the proud Toast tradition, and despite the inexplicable continuation of what is perhaps the worst upgrade “deal” in the history of software, is still a good value.