DVD Caveat

By Dirk Fischer, Educational Technology Consultant

The current ad campaigns from Apple and Microsoft about making high-quality videos on your desktop and then burning them onto a high capacity DVD are very exciting. You may have visions of Video Yearbook DVDs with highlights of the whole sports season on them.

It is definitely possible for you to make such a DVD on your new G4 or DVD recorder-equipped PC; but making copies for distribution of your yearbook DVD is quite another story.

You see, these inexpensive DVD burners in new computers do wonders in reducing the amount of time needed to make a DVD down from ten to around two hours, depending on the system but they do not make the type of DVD needed by duplicating services as a master DVD for making hundreds of copies. They use what are known as DVD-R General Purpose Media with a 4.7 gigabyte capacity.

Unfortunately, duplicators need a master burned onto DVD-R Authoring Media in either 3.95 or 4.7 gigabyte capacities or material delivered on a Digital Linear Tape. I won't go into the technical details here (it's the frequencies of the lasers used and certain header file information formats), but suffice to say that you cannot currently use DVD-R Authoring Media as the "consumer" level drives, and DLT drives are not cheap or easy to install.

The industry is working on this problem so I expect the ability to use DVD-R General Media as a duplication master to happen "Real Soon Now." So if you have big plans about distributing material via DVD, beware 800 copies at two hours each is 66.7 non-stop days of burning!