Chapter 14. Creating Digital Output

Chapter 12 addressed DVD creation, and Chapter 13 covered writing back to tape. This chapter covers producing digital files for playback on your hard disk, copying to a CD or DVD, or posting to a Web site.

A key component of digital video output is compression, so I'll start by defining some compression-related terms to make sure we're on the same page. Then we'll look at Studio's format options, which have increased in Studio 10, and I'll give you my thoughts on their relative strengths and weaknesses. Next we'll take a task-oriented view of encoding, where I'll identify the format and preset I would use for a variety of compression tasks.

With this as background, we'll learn how to produce files with all available formats, from AVI to 3GGP and three flavors of MPEG in between.

Note that this chapter discusses CD and DVD as data-storage devices, not specialized formats that play in a player attached to your television. That is, if you want to produce a Windows Media file to copy to a CD or DVD to send to a friend to play on a computer, you're in the right place. If you want to author a production that can be viewed on a DVD player and TV set, go to Chapter 12.