A (Tiny) Bit of Background

I won't spend much time on this, but before you embark on this journey making your own video DVDs containing high-quality digital video, animated menus, and more I feel you should have some idea of how things were in the old days. I think it'll help you understand why burning your own DVDs is so cool.

The Mac has been the tool of creative thinkers since its introduction in 1984. In fact, one of the first and most popular non-business, non-game Mac programs in those early days was a brilliant little program called VideoWorks from an eccentric little company called MacroMind.

VideoWorks grew into Director, MacroMind grew into the publicly held Macromedia, and MacroMind co-founder Marc Canter grew larger, louder, and richer.

Of course, in spite of its name, VideoWorks wasn't "real" video it was more like "CartoonWorks." And though it was fun, and neat, it couldn't make the same stuff as you saw on TV.

Back then, when Macintosh SEs and Mac Pluses ruled the Earth, Macs were pretty much incapable of working with video. They lacked expansion, hard disk capacity, RAM, internal bus bandwidth (a bus is a pathway for data inside your computer), and any type of high-speed data bus, to mention a few.

NuBus slots and SCSI ports, introduced in the early '90s, were a step in the right direction, but Macs (and indeed, most personal computers) still lacked sufficient horsepower to process video efficiently or effectively.

Does anyone remember VideoSpigot? It was the first cheap ($200) NuBus video capture card. In the early days of QuickTime, everyone I knew bought one and made lots of great little postage-stamp-size movies (using Premiere 1.0, no less).

The point is that until recently, video production and postproduction were still the exclusive domain of the million-dollar editing suites I mentioned in the introduction, and far out of the reach of the common computer user.