Authoring DVDs with Liquid Edition 6

You can make DVD authoring in Liquid Edition as complex as you want. Creating a standard menu should create no real problems, but animated menus, variable bit rate, and nested menus can confuse the beginner and professional user alike.

I cover creating a DVD with a one-page menu in the first half of this chapter, and spend the second half with more complex topics. By the end of this chapter, you should completely understand how to create some impressive-looking DVD menus with fully animated backgrounds and buttons too, if you so desire.

Tip

• The DVD Editor doesn't open unless a DVD menu is on the Timeline.

SVCD and VCD

SVCD (super video CD) and VCD (video CD) are formats you use to burn video to ordinary CDs. Although this might sound intriguingif only because CD media is cheaper than DVDbe aware of the catch in the quality department. Because SVCD and VCD have a smaller physical storage area, video must be compressed at a much lower rate, which produces poorer quality videos. The quality of SVCD isn't that bad when you view it on a computer, but when you see it on a DVD player, it isn't comparable to DVD quality.

Although I'm primarily interested in DVD authoring in this chapter, you can use all of the techniques you find here to make an SVCD or VCD. The only real difference is the burn settings you use in the final stage.

The Mini DV setting is a variation on the burn settings theme that allows you to burn your DVD to an 8cm DVD or to a CD-R/RW. When you do so, you'll find that quality is high, but the amount of space you have is restricted to 750 MB.