Diploma in Digital Film

DDF 109 - DVD Authoring

This is a very hands on course. As the software to author DVDs has become easier to use, we've needed to put less and less theory in the course. On the course DVD you'll find kitsets that you will use to author DVDs – each kitset contains a selection of video clips, audio files and still images that you will feed into your computer to produce a finished disc which you will post in. The video clips contain only a minute or so of each feature so that we can fit the entire course onto a single DVD, and this also means your computer won't be tied up all day compressing video.

What are the assessments?

Again you have a series of tasks to give you a handle on the basics, and then you start burning discs! There are five DVDs to make, each one more complex that the last. You have quite a lot of freedom in how you design your projects, so long as you fulfil the requirements of the brief for each DVD. You'll also need to closely look at and analyse a variety of commercially made DVDs and write a short report on each.

What gear do I need?

You'll need either a superdrive or an external firewire DVD burner for this paper. For software, DVD Studio Pro (comes as part of Final Cut Studio) is strongly recommended, but it is possible to complete the course using any professional level DVD authoring programme. There are tutorials on using Encore and DVDSP. If you have windows DVD authoring software you are welcome to use that (but we cannot offer you any technical support with windows gear). iDVD is not suitable for this course.

Here are a couple of sample pages from the course documents. These are just pages at random, but they’ll give you an idea of the course content.

109-02 page4.pdf

109-03 page1.pdf