DVD writing

Liquid lets you make DVDs directly off the timeline with multiple menus, chapter points, and either still video backgrounds for the menus.  The really useful part is that making your DVD becomes part of the editing process and you can make all your links and menus as you edit.  Links are also frame accurate.  So once you have finished your edit you don’t have to go through another procedure to make the DVD!  When doing our tutorials and demo DVD we have always done the edit, then encoded the footage, then though about how to layout the DVD – in some case having to go back and re-edit the footage because the DVD, which is a non-linear format – did not match the linear way we had made the project for tape.

Making a DVD

First you add a DVD menu track to the timeline – then either use the DVD wizard or load a blank menu or a template which you can customise.

The DVD editor as shown here as many templates on the left hand side.  To use one just drag it to the DVD menu track.  You can either create every page of the menu yourself or if, for example, you choose a menu with 4 buttons and you have 15 chapter points, Liquid will automatically create extra pages to accommodate these extra buttons.  If you get Liquid to create the extra pages then all the menus have to be still images ones, I.E.: no video in the background.  I prefer to create my own personally.  Obvious you can link to other menus or clips in the project and the links can be thumbnail buttons or just plain text or an object you have created.  If a thumbnail then Liquid automatically uses the frame from the timeline where the link was added as the thumbnail, although you can move along the timeline and quickly change the thumbnail to another frame at the press of a button.

Chapter points in Liquid’s DVD making are called anchors.  These can either be completely locked to a point on the timeline, or anchored to a part of a clip.  The latter means that if you insert or remove and clips then the chapter point sticks with the clip is was assigned to.  Extremely useful as one of the major advantages of using Liquid’s built in DVD writing is that you can do it while editing.

There is a DVD menu editor built into Liquid 5 – based on the titling program Title Deko.  It allows you to add text and premade buttons in a variety of styles and has options for aligning buttons and distributing them evenly in a given space.  You can also bring in your own images to use as buttons and define them as simple shapes of thumbnail buttons.  You can also define your button highlights here by simply clicking a box that says active and choosing a colour.  Much, much easier than the old way with impression of making complex Photoshop images with different layers and a Pinnacle colour palette in the background….    Although highlights can be adjust inside Liquid’s DVD editor this is easier.   One curiosity is that like the titler if the computer crashes during making a menu then it does not get saved by Liquid’s autosave function.  This is because they are effectively separate programs that have been launched from within Liquid.

It is still possible to make menus in Photoshop with different layers as you would with Impression, although there really is not much need for it!

The DVD creator has several other good options.  This navigation view is probably my favourite – This view allows you to define the starting button and then what happens when you press the left, right, up or down button on your DVD remote.  To change the behaviour just go to the right hand side of the clip and click on it and right hand arrow will appear.  To change the button this goes to just drag the arrow to your chosen button.  In other DVD writing programs, like DVD Workshop, the computer decides exactly which button is the default (normally the first one you add but sometimes not!) and what happens when you press the navigation button.

Liquid also has some nice tools that warn of VOB problems (the result of having two chapter points too close together) and a special view to show you highlight collisions (where you buttons overlap thereby causing a menu problem) and your title safe area (to make sure all your buttons appear on screen).

This options screen allows you to set different editing settings.  Notice the make snapshot button - this enables you to take a picture of a menu to be used as an icon in anothe rmenu, something I have wanted to do on many occasions!

Video menus are normally hassle to create – either you create a background first and then create highlights for it, or, as with DVD Workshop, you drag on buttons and then place clips inside them.  This works fine in DVD Workshop although the rendering times of these menus is quite horrendous!

Inside Liquid you have an editing and composting program at your disposal – Liquid itself!  SO you just open up a clip, choose the video you want as a thumbnail and drag it onto the button.  As you can see here I have several thumbnail buttons and all the video used as thumbnails has gone onto the timeline under the menu, complete with a realtime 2D effect to make them fit the frame, all of which can be adjusted and other effects added. 

Once you are happy with your DVD you can  preview the results.  If you have the Liquid Pro board added this preview will be direct to the TV – even if you have a complex moving background it will preview, and depending on how complex it is depend on how accurate the preview is.  For a menu with about 5 layers this will pro0bably be in realtime.  This gives you a great way to check out the buttons and text to make sure everything is readable.

Once you are happy with the way your DVD works then you write it.  Liquid’s export to DVD option can create files on the hard drive as well as write direct to many DVD writers.  Also included are options to do VCD and SVCDs as well as DVDs – VCD were not an option with version 4.

One thing we did not mention – there is a wizard for making DVDs including items like this auto link box – also accessible without the wizard.  Personally I am not a fan of wizards and use this very rarely but it does help the process.

The manual is also worth a mention at this point as it is fairly good.  We will, of course, be producing an update to our successful Liquid tutorial to cover making DVDs with version 5.

The export the DVD options...

The first specifies whether you are building your DVD from this sequence, and existing file or image...

Notice the handy readout at the bottom of the screen showing how much of your DVD is used.

Amongst the reference sets we have several options.

The second screen allows you to choose the type of stream. Program stream will be used for making CDs with MPEG to be played in other computers. SVCDs obviously make SVCDS (with 35 minutes only on each disk - this is not variable), VOB files for DVD authoring programs that require them, and image file so that you can latter write the disk.

For users of version 4 notice the CRC check box under MPEG audio.  A silly ommission fro version 4 that meant everytime you loaded footage from Liquid 4 into Pinnacle's own DVD writing program it would complain it was not pukker.  A small fix but a nice one.

The third screen allows you to choose your CD writer/DVD writer and burn the disk.

The new 4th screen gives you various writing options - notice the option not to re-encode existing chanpter files - very useful if once you have made a disc you suddenly notice a small mistake.  You don't really want to have to wait for it to encode the whole thing again.

The most interesting option here is size correction - Liquid will automatically adjust the bitrate of your DVD so that the whole sequence will fit on the disc. With most programs you have to specify the bit rate yourself and after your length encoding process may find that the video does not fit on your DVD - meaning you to do another lengthy encoding process!

MPEG OPTIONS

There are only a few encoding options. With version 5 Liquid can now make constant or variable bit rate streams, and so a new option of maximum bite rate as well as average has been added.   You can adjust the bitrate between 8mbs and 2Mbs and you can also adjust the GOP structure. The fast and good settings as their names imply change the speed of encoding. Fast is actually quite good quality, although good is obviously better.

The encoding is not the fastest in the world but the quality is pretty good and quite an improvement over version 4.  Obviously the faster computer the better – we will running some tests on various machines over the next few weeks and will post the differences here,

On a 1.8hz Pentium approx 2hrs 25 minutes took around 10 hours to encode, which is about 4 or 5 to one –not as fast as using dedicated hardware like the Storm or the RT.X100, or using software such as Premiere’s encoder – however the quality is better and probably only bested by Canopus excellent ProCoder.

Of course, you still have the option to create just an MPEG stream, which you can use, is another DVD writing program if you prefer!

Of course, there are some disadvantages to the process:

1. You have to use Liquid’s MPEG encoder and not a 3rd parties.  You can load up MPEG footage into Liquid and use it in a DVD but it is lot harder to set up chapter points and Liquid may insist of converting the MPEG footage to DV then back again before making the disc.
2. Liquid 5 does not do different audio tracks, video tracks of subtitles – for this you need ReelDVD or Pinnacle’s Impression Pro
3. The process is more complex than using a simple DVD writing program like Ulead’s DVD Workshop
4. You can’t add chapter points to a movie without linking them to a menu.  Sometimes I will write a disc with some main chapters but with other chapter points every 5 minutes just to aid skipping quickly through the DVD.  To do this with version 
5. You have to add a menu for all chapter points.