DVDabblings

When I got my new PC a little over a year ago, I got the latest version of Nero with it, which includes a nice utility for building DVDs out of existing video files, complete with menus (with custom backgrounds, music, or even full-motion video if you like), customizable to the nines. Very exciting stuff for someone like me.
And then I was crushed when I couldn’t burn a disc to save my mortal soul. Nothing worked. I wasted DVD-R after DVD-R.
I’m not sure that you can stick enough numbers on a single line to some up with the precise mathematical measurement of how head-thumpingly, staggeringly stupid I felt when I discovered only just recently, having long since given up on making DVDs, that DVD+R discs are what I needed all along.
I’ve been a bit restless lately, and according to some who have to live with me on a day-to-day basis, a grouchy bastard, while I’m waiting for the new motherboard to arrive for the Avid so we can get that bad boy up and running. But in the meantime, I’ve been playing with 3D Studio Max, Nero, and all sort of other good stuff, just to take my mind off of it, and what I’m learning about these other apps may well be proof that this delay in getting Colossus back up and running is part of the great cosmic scheme, if you buy into that sort of thing. Nerovision Express, the DVD-building program I’m using, is stacked with options – if this is the Lite version, the thought of the full-up monster boggles my mind. You can build chapter stops (and titles) into video files, build your menu (and any submenus you deem necessary) however you like them, and the menu will be as long as whatever music or sound file you’ve put in it as background music (or whichever video file is your background, if you’re choosing that option). I just today figured out how to force anamorphic 16:9 as a disc’s native video format. Seriously – you can author the hell out of these things in your living room. These things play just beautifully on a DVD player too.
Once I’ve actually got this beautiful Borg cube of a machine up and running that allows me to make my own stuff rather than just burn a disc of some reconstructed missing Doctor Who episodes I’ve downloaded, I do believe we’re going to be off and running.