You’ve been able to burn a DVD on your general retail personal computer for at least ten years. Have you ever wanted to burn a Dual-Layer DVD? Commonly referred to as DVD+R DL (or DVD-R DL). Know what one is? The later can hold up to 8.5 gigabytes, compared with only 4.7 gigabytes of the other.
It’s the morning of the 21st of December and I’m coming down off an all night DVD burning bender. 16 of them. Two sets of 8. Roughly 128 gb. Over 20 hours of family videos transferred from 27 Betamax tapes by my girlfriend, Nicole Miller. The project is her’s. She conceived and designed. With full menus with animated chapter previews, disc and jewel case artwork. All in a nice red Stockholm CD Box. I’m handling the digital video technical production and I’ve been sleeping next to my laptop with a timer going off every 20 minutes to feed the burner.
The final product. Scanned labels from the Betamax tapes used for the artwork. Designed by Nicole Miller
I’ve been using Apple’s DVD Studio Pro for about seven years. Most of my work has been small projects. Maybe an hour at the most. After learning last minute about breakpoints and the best fact of all–that a 4.7 gigabyte is not in fact the true size. While we were all learning about kilobytes (kb) and megabyte (mb) the DVD came along and someone slipped in the gigabyte (gb) reference. DVD disc sizes are expressed in GB but in fact are measured in decimal billions of bytes (see chart). Meaning that the DVD you bought that says GB really only holds 4.37 GB (not 4.7). Really fun when you have already calculated the amount of clips per DVD. A great 11th hour change. But I work during the day in a business of 11th hour changes so it’s common practice for me but you might not like it. Another fun factoid are breakpoints. The area in the DVD where the player stops playing layer 1 and goes to layer 2. DVD Studio Pro did not want to build without a breakpoint when I was trying to build so I decided to build all of the DVDs to a hard drive then burn the VIDEO_TS folder. DVD Studio Pro did not like formatting the DVDs with VIDEO_TS with no breakpoint (breakpoints are not carried over to the hard drive written folder). Fortunately I had recently picked up Toast 10 Titanium and I not yet used it. Turned out to be the project saver app. An amazing user interface and it burned the VIDEO_TS folder with no problem. What about those pesky breakpoints? Turns out that they are placed automatically in the data when it is burned by Toast. DVD Studio Pro gives you the option of automatically and the also placing it in the video. The idea is so you do not get skips in the video when you jump to the next layer. I don’t see the need. Every movie I’ve watched on a DL disc (most of them you have too) may have a slight skip depending on the player. More like a freeze. It’s not life changing and often is completely not noticed. Bad news in this phase of the project is that DVD Studio Pro failed me when it came to the breakpoint issue. It was not informative or user friendly.
Your Mac's DVD player may not like these.
I was not out of the woods yet as I quickly learned. Turns out the media I purchased did not like my *NEW* Macbook Pro (MacBookPro5,5 or A1278). All sorts of nasty mean messages with scary words like critical and fault associated with hardware and then a bunch of x’s and zeroes. Very friendly.
These might be a higher quality.
The media I purchased first was by Memorex. After wasting ten of them I had another last minute life saving forum moment. I learned that Verbatim made a better quality product so I left my hungry burner as soon as the closest Best Buy opened. Fortunately, living in NYC there are a few Best Buys. Two within a 15 minute walk of each other. I grabbed the Verbatim’s and also an external drive. The LG GE20. I was amazed at how cheap DVD burners are now. They even had one Blu-ray burner. With Toast’s support for Blu-ray it may be a great option for later this year. The costs per disk is outrageous still. Verbatim sells a 3-pack for $27.99.
I then split my burn job up between my Macbook and my other machine, a Dual PowerPC G5. Make the minor investment in an external burner. The joke was that the Memorex’s worked more often in the LG external.
LG External Burner. Faster than the one in the new Macbooks and you can get it for less than $100.00.
My recommendation is that dual-layer DVDs are worth it and that you should consider making the minor investment in an external drive to burn them. The ones Apple is shipping with their units may be rotten. Always check the forums related to the projects you are working on. If it’s digital video (or burning it) or anything new media related the odds are someone in the last five years has experience it and has provided a solution. When you up against a deadline, Google. And be fueled on the flight deck in case you have to run to the store. Good luck!
Tech Used For This Project:
- Macbook Pro 13″ (MacBookPro5,5 or A1278)
Intel Core Duo, 2.26 4GB RAM
Internal Disc Drive: HL-DT-ST DVDRW GS23N
Media That Worked: Verbatim - Power Mac (PowerMac7,3)
Dual 2 Ghz PowerPC G5 3.5GB RAM
External Disc Drive: LG GE20, HL-DT-ST DVDRWGE20LU11