Creating a School DVD?

[Accolades]

Hi,

Looking for advice, guidence, suggestions...

I am about to start creating an end of year VD for our Year 7 students using VS10+.

The material I have varies from photos, Moviemaker files for each student/class small videos of staff/teachers as well as some support music mp3's

What is the best way to put it together?

Create individual video files of each sub group/topic and then bring the sub group videos(mp2) files and create a master Video(mp2) video/file, then put all the master video files together for burning the DVD?

ie I have I have moviemaker files for each student in class groups and have several class groups and would like to group them as one 'topic' on the dvd allowing students to choose their class for the dvd menu.

How can I create a menu of each grouo with chapters for each sub group?

Should I save all the video files using an 8000 bit rate?

Souunds like fun!!

Thanks for all the advise in anticipation...

[DVDDoug]

What is the best way to put it together?

Create individual video files of each sub group/topic and then bring the sub group videos(mp2) files and create a master Video(mp2) video/file, then put all the master video files together for burning the DVD?

If possible, you should work with DV files. (You get AVI/DV files when you import video from a DV camera. You'll know that you have DV files if they eat-up 13GB of disk space per hour of video.)

MPEG files can sometimes cause trouble, including the "lip-sync" problems that inspired my tagline/signature below! DivX and Xvid can be even more trouble... In general, the more compressed the video file, the more likely you are to have problems with it.

The same goes for MP3s. It would be better to work with WAV files. You can try, but if you have trouble, you may need to convert all of your audio files to WAV before importing them into Video Studio.

With DV, it is safe to edit and save multiple times. With MPEG-2 or other more-compressed formats, you are more likely to notice the quality loss you get with each "lossy" encode cycle. (If you are just "cutting & splicing", your preliminary editing won't require re-coding, so you should be OK.) Yes, it would be a good idea to do some pre-editing and organizing for a project involving so many different sources.

How can I create a menu of each group with chapters for each sub group?

Refer to the User Manual. Look-up Adding / Editing Chapters and Submenus.

Should I save all the video files using an 8000 bit rate?

If you are working with DV, you don't get to choose the bitrate. If you are combining MPEG-2 files, the idea is to minimize the number of times it's re-coded. So, choose a bitrate that matches most of your source files (if possible). That will minimize the re-coding. When you're all done, you can use the same bitrate for the DVD, or re-code to a lower bitrate if it won't fit on the DVD as-is.

If your source MPEGs all have different bitrates, choose a bitrate that will be used on the final DVD, depending on the expected length of the program. (i.e. With Dolby audio, you can fit 90 minutes of 6000kbps video on a single-layer DVD.) Here's a Bitrate Calculator.

The most important thing is to get started early, learn to use the software, and make a "rough-draft" DVD so that you don't run out of time when you run into problems later. Since you are creating a fairly complicated DVD by combining video, stills, and audio from several different sources (probably in several different formats) it is very likely that something will go wrong along the way.

[sjj1805]

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