The time has come to start printing your finished film onto DVD. Film aficionados (the independent filmmaker’s target market) have thoroughly embraced this versatile, high-resolution format -- not to mention its inevitable rise in the popular rental market. It may have taken longer than most people expected, but the US DVD market has finally overtaken VHS. Rental of VHS cassettes has dropped 13% over the last year while rentals of DVD has grown 111%.
According to Jeff Hammond of Copper Moon Digital, two excellent reasons present themselves for mastering your film to DVD. First off, you offer the best possible viewing experience for your film on DVD with the high quality format and meaningful enhancements through extra features. It is a better way for the filmmaker to communicate with the audience and gives the opportunity to show how the film was shot, edited and produced. Secondly, DVD demonstrates quality and that the filmmaker understands the DVD (rental) process as well as film (theatrical).
So what are the barriers to printing your independent film project on DVD? Probably the most immediate obstacle is unfamiliarity. The format is so new that many film producers are simply not knowledgeable about the post-production process of preparing materials for printing DVD. Another psychological hurdle is the perception that mastering a DVD is a costly and complex process. Although mastering does take sophisticated software authoring tools and expertise, the cost of replicating DVD can actually be less than the cost of replicating VHS.
Delivery of completed assets is essential to successfully completing the
mastering of your DVD. Completed assets means a finished edit of your film and menu graphics. Incomplete assets would be any video that needed editing, color correcting or audio that needs to be mixed or sweetened.
The completed edit can be done on any tape format that your DVD studio requires but it is best to get the highest quality video transfers as
possible, such as Digital Beta. MPEG compression takes away from the
quality and the higher quality you start with the less likely you will be to
have artifacting in the encoding process.
Concerns about progressive vs. non-progressive do not come into play when it comes to telecining your film footage. Sophisticated DVD software is capable of reverse pull-down. “Pull-down” is a process by which extra video fields get thrown in during telecining to make the transfer from 24fps to 30fps. With the MPEG encoding, the DVD authoring software can pull out those extra frames (6 per second). This reverse pull-down removes those redundant fields to increase the amount of space available on the DVD, used for higher bit-rate encoding or more extra features.
This high quality resolution videotape dub should be time-coded with plenty of pre-roll and post roll. It behooves the producer to provide a paper list of chapter breaks with time-code references and short descriptions.
Audio must be on the videotape in sync and during the processing, sound is encoded as Dolby Stereo. As producers become more and more savvy about DVD production, it is common to have separate audio tracks for director commentary or other languages. In these cases, it is best to have a completely separate dub with video and the secondary audio track. Although the video is encoded just once, it is helpful to have the picture sync reference when other audio versions are encoded later.
Menu graphics can be a bit technical but only require two separate graphics containing a background layer, all the buttons, and text delivered in a specific pixel size. A motion background menu can be easily built by delivering a videotape of the desired footage, which would then be encoded onto the DVD as a background loop. Anyone proficient with Photoshop can make these menus but you should consult with your DVD mastering technician for their specific requirements.
This key advice applies to the entire process, and post-production in
general. Consultations are more and more desirable early on in the
production phase. “DVDs are no longer an afterthought,” Hammond said. “They are becoming the main way to distribute.” With extra features and director commentary, many Hollywood directors are thinking about the DVD features during the production process. Talking to your DVD studio technician can only make the process easier, so establish communication as early in the process as possible.
Hammond did have some suggestions for avoiding common pitfalls: Make absolutely sure everything is spelled correctly. If there is a typo, new graphics must be created and it requires going back several steps in the authoring process instead of one. Stay away from skinny fonts and try to use a minimum 12 pt. Rent a DVD and you’ll see how big is acceptable. Aside from that, remember to maintain the “title safe” and “action safe” areas of the screen.
According to Hammond, a ballpark figure for mastering a DVD with two hours of footage runs around $800. This would require that the filmmaker provide the graphical menus, but this can work to his/her advantage. Creative control over the look and feel of the DVD lies in the hands of the filmmaker if they create their own menus in house.
Replication is a separate cost; a run of a 1000 would be about $0.75 per disc with two-color screen printing for a single layer disc. Packaging in Amaray cases usually run about 37 cents a piece. All told, the cost is less than duplicating VHS dubs. A very economical choice, considering the numerous creative and professional advantages offered by this high quality format.
Sincere thanks to Jeff Hammond, President of Copper Moon Digital, for his invaluable expertise on DVD authoring.