Customer Reviews

Making DVDs : Creating and Authoring Your Own Discs

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I do video production for a living. I am in the process of upgrading my business/equipment to include the ability to burn DVD's for my clients. This book didn't teach me the steps to accomplish this goal. This book was very general covering video production generalities, case studies, lots of technical jargon. I have a degree in television production, and the technical jargon in this book was WAY over my head. It did suggested some different DVD authoring programs for both a PC and MAC. Chapter 17 was the only chapter that really somewhat covered the differences in DVD-, DVD+, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-Rom, etc. But most of that chapter was hard to understand with technical terms that weren't really explained. I guess you could go thru the glossary and try to decifer the meanings, but I'd recommend looking for a different book. Out of the 304 pages, I found maybe 30 pages that were useful to me. I think I need one of those books for "dummies".

Making DVDs is a well-rounded, informative handbook. It's easy to read and uses a "learn by doing" approach. By following the book's guidelines and suggestions, anyone can succeed in authoring a DVD project confidently. I think the book is a great value. I have two earlier CD-ROM/CD-R/DVD books by this author. He is well versed in the present state of the evolving DVD technology.

It took me a while to see the value in "Making DVD's", and at first, I too only found a few pages of details that I thought were the real gold in the text. However, after reading through the different case studies, this is where the real benefit of this book comes in. These are real-world examples of people just like me that had a dream and a vision, and, by their example, I will be better equipped to make my project a success. Now, if you want to know about the latest gizmo to burn DVD's, or the latest format, or the number of henways per femptome, look somewhere else. Buy a magazine for that. If you want to learn how to capture an event correctly and learn from the examples of others that have gone before, this is for you. Consider this a crash coarse in film making from start to finish.