dvd
Making DV tapes into DVD with subtitles is not so easy
31/07/05 Filed in: Video
Well, I've had a couple of PAL DV tapes from our wedding a few years back and I've kept telling people who didn't understand the french ceremony that I'd make an NTSC DVD with subtitles. Should be easy right? Everything is digital.
Well, 4 years later, after lots of casual attempts, I finally dug in, said it will be done, and cleaned about 20 gigs of space on my hard drive to get to work. Yes you can buy software that should help make DVD's but either they are easy and cannot make subtitles or they are hard, expensive, and say they can do everything if you read their manuals.
Complicating things was my 2ghz/1.5gb server at the other end of a Microsoft terminal services connection so I do not have an actual monitor on the machine making the video.
The source of any useful information turned out to be http://www.videohelp.com with lots of reviews, how tos, and links to everywhere under the sun. Here is a summary of what I did using free software. NOTE: CyberLink's Power Producer & NERO were included as OEM with my CDROM but I guess they cannot be considered free for everyone.
So, at the end, a quick test in VideoLAN seems to show everything in the right place though I really should go through to check that the subtitles are not too out of sync.
Anyways, it is a possible project but it really seems to take a long time, almost 9 hours not counting the numerous failed attempts with other softwares.
So, yes it can be done with enough harddrive space but with all of the testing (another hour to check the sync and then to test on a real NTSC player, not to mention making any changes to the subtitles after seeing them in action) it is not for the weak of heart.
Well, 4 years later, after lots of casual attempts, I finally dug in, said it will be done, and cleaned about 20 gigs of space on my hard drive to get to work. Yes you can buy software that should help make DVD's but either they are easy and cannot make subtitles or they are hard, expensive, and say they can do everything if you read their manuals.
Complicating things was my 2ghz/1.5gb server at the other end of a Microsoft terminal services connection so I do not have an actual monitor on the machine making the video.
The source of any useful information turned out to be http://www.videohelp.com with lots of reviews, how tos, and links to everywhere under the sun. Here is a summary of what I did using free software. NOTE: CyberLink's Power Producer & NERO were included as OEM with my CDROM but I guess they cannot be considered free for everyone.
* Power Producer quickly converted the PAL DV files to NTSC/DVD format in 2 hours
* Subtitle Workshop was used to make the subtitles and export them in ..SRT/SubRip format (3 hours to make the translations, and about 2 hours to enter the information)
* Subtitle Creator converted the .SRT directly to .SUP format (just a few seconds)
* VobEdit took the DVD filesystem created by Power Producer and deconstructed (demux) the video and audio components (about 15-20 minutes)
* DVDAuthorGUI reconstructed the video and audio components and integrated the .SUP format (about an hour but by then I was reading Orson Scott Card's Speaker For The Dead and was just occasionally checking the status)
* NERO to burn the DVD to a 4.7gb DVD disk.
So, at the end, a quick test in VideoLAN seems to show everything in the right place though I really should go through to check that the subtitles are not too out of sync.
Anyways, it is a possible project but it really seems to take a long time, almost 9 hours not counting the numerous failed attempts with other softwares.
So, yes it can be done with enough harddrive space but with all of the testing (another hour to check the sync and then to test on a real NTSC player, not to mention making any changes to the subtitles after seeing them in action) it is not for the weak of heart.
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