Making a DVD Video Portfolio: DVD Basics

Sonja Schenk

Like many creative professionals, whenever I’m between jobs for more than a couple weeks, a dreaded thought starts to form: Maybe it’s time to redo my reel.

An up-to-date demo reel or interactive portfolio is essential for creative professionals, but as anyone who’s created a demo reel knows, it’s a time-consuming and often expensive undertaking. As a result, it’s not uncommon for a working professional to complete several freelance jobs before they even consider a revision of their demo reel.

What I wanted, this time around, was to make my demo reel as easy to reconfigure as my resume. So I decided to put my demo reel on DVD.

DVDs are small and elegant, and the technology needed to create them has suddenly trickled down to the consumer level. They’re the perfect choice for creative professionals who work with dynamic media: title designers, 2D and 3D animators, visual effects artists, compositors, broadcast designers, editors, sound designers, and cinematographers to name a few. Putting your reel on DVD isn’t something that should be limited to motion graphics professionals, however: DVD is also a perfect slideshow medium for still graphics artists, designers, and photographers. And those who’ve done work for the Internet can add active Web links to their DVDs.

No More Tape?
For a long while, the standard delivery medium has been videotape and that has left a lot to be desired. Videotape is fragile – too much time sitting on the shelf and it’s prone to drop-outs and glitches. Videotape is expensive – not the individual tapes themselves, but the cost of editing, outputting to a high-quality master videotape, and duplicating to VHS or 3/4-inch tape. And, let’s face it: Videotape isn’t very glamorous. But, videotape does one advantage — almost everyone has access to a VHS player.

It’s true that DVD players aren’t as widespread as VHS players in the consumer market – although that’s changing rapidly — but they’re pretty easy to come by in the professional world. Most computers come with a DVD player and many new computers come with a DVD burner. It’s highly unlikely that a prospective employer won’t have access to a DVD player nowadays.

But these aren’t the only reasons I decided to put my reel on DVD.

The biggest reason is that a DVD reel is much easier to revise than a videotape reel. Your DVD project will reside on your computer, available for editing and re-arranging as jobs require. Perhaps it won’t be quite as easy as redoing your resume in a word processing application, but it’ll be a lot easier than re-editing your reel on videotape. And since you can choose to burn DVDs on an as-needed basis, you can tailor your DVD reel to suit a particular job that you’re going for, the same way you probably already tailor your resume.

In this first of a three-part series, we’ll discuss the nuts and bolts of DVDs and the initial planning stages of creating a DVD for your demo reel. In part two, we’ll cover how to create a graphical interface, set up a basic set of menus and buttons, and prepare still graphics for a DVD. In part three, we’ll discuss the ins and outs of preparing video and audio media for inclusion on a DVD and how to put the finishing touches on, test and publish your final DVD.

What, Exactly, Is a DVD?
In computer terms, a DVD is an optical disk — very similar to a CD — that offers enough storage to hold a lot of media, anywhere from 3 to 18 GB. DVDs record media in a way that’s similar to CDs, using a laser that heats the surface of the disk, enabling it to hold electronic data. DVDs can be single-sided or double-sided and each side can hold one-layer of information or two. A DVD that’s used simply to store media is known as a data DVD to help differentiate it from the DVDs that contains movies, which are known as video DVDs.

A standard DVD, known as DVD-5, holds 4.7 gigabytes of media on a single side, enough to store a 135-minute feature film. DVD-9 disks offer 8.54 GB of storage on a single side using two layers. DVD-10 disks are double-sided, for a total of 9.4 GB and DVD-18 disks have two layers on two sides, for a total of 17.08 GB. For most demo reels, the standard DVD-5 is the disk format of choice – it works in all players, doesn’t require the user to flip it over, and 4.7 GB is probably more than adequate in terms of storage space.

There are currently seven types of DVD devices:

• DVD-video players are TV set-top consoles similar to a VCR. They can play video DVDs but cannot play data DVDs and cannot record.
• DVD-ROM drives can play both video and data DVDs, but cannot write to DVD. If you have a relatively new computer, chances are you have a DVD-ROM drive.
• DVD-R drives are capable of both playing and writing data and video DVDs. Apple’s Superdrive is a DVD-R drive.
• DVD-RW drives are capable of both playing and writing data and video DVDs. The video DVDs they create are compatible with most DVD-video players and can be rewritten thousands of times.
• DVD-RAM drives use a special cartridge system for fast random access to media, however the disks that they write are not likely to be compatible with set-top DVD-video players.
• DVD+RW drives are new to the market. They are designed for multiple use and are capable of recording on both sides of the disk. The disks they create are compatible with most DVD-video players.
• DVD-audio players are for very high quality, read-only audio recordings.

There are three types of DVD disks that you can buy to burn your DVD reel:

• DVD-Rs, like CD-Rs, are designed for one-time recording and can be played in most standard DVD-video players.

 

• DVD-RWs are resuable thousands of times.
• DVD+RWs are also designed for multiple use and are double-sided.All of these disks can play in a DVD-video player. For a demo reel, you’ll use DVD-Rs for the reels you send out to prospective employers, but a DVD-RW or DVD+RW disk can be handy when testing your project before you publish. (We’ll talk more about burning and testing a DVD, including how to get one made if you don’t have a recordable DVD drive, in part three of this series.)
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  How DVDs Work
  DVD is much more than a storage medium. It’s also a way of building interlinked audio, video, and still graphics files so that any DVD-video player can read and play them back, whether it’s a movie, game, or other form of interactive multimedia, like your demo reel. These specifications, known as the DVD standard, were developed in tandem with the electronics, computer and entertainment industries.

  Thanks to the insistence of the film studios, video DVDs have some pretty impressive capabilities. A standard DVD can hold up to 135 minutes of full-screen, full-motion MPEG-2 video. MPEG-2 is a video compression algorithm, or codec, that discards unnecessary or repetitive information in the video footage in order to save space. (DVDs can also play MPEG-1 video but it’s of significantly lower quality than MPEG-2 and rarely used today.) With MPEG-2, one minute of video requires about 30 MB of storage space. If you edit music videos for a living, you can fit more than 20 videos on a single DVD. If you design graphics for commercials, you could probably put a hundred of them on a DVD. DVDs are also capable of having up to nine streams of video playing at the same time. The controls on a standard DVD remote allow the viewer to switch between the different streams.

  DVD audio comes in five flavors:

  • PCMaudio is the same as the audio that’s recorded on audio CDs and includes the standard digital sound formats WAV, AIFF and SDII (Sound Designer II).
• Dolby AC-3 audio consists of 5.1 channel Dolby Digital Surround Sound. Typically the 5.1 channels are designed to create a surround environment in a movie theater, so the channels are layed out as left, center, right, left surround, right surround (that’s 5} and an optional subwoofer track (that’s .1) for low-frequency sounds. Yes, that means you can design your reel with surround sound, or if your clips have audio that is already configured with a surround mix, you can maintain the integrity of that audio. But if surround sound is out of your league, don’t worry Dolby AC-3 doesn’t require that your sound tracks are arranged this way.
• MPEG audio is not used in North America.
• DTS and SDDS audio are other forms of surround sound used for feature films.DVDs can also have multiple streams of sound, each containing a full mix for different language versions or extras like director commentaries. Finally, DVDs have up to 32 special built-in subtitle tracks, again for distribution in many languages.

  Last but not least, the DVD standard allows for interactivity. A main menu gives the viewer a set of basic choices and can lead to sub-menus, foreign-language and subtitles selections, and other options. Because video DVDs were originally designed to play on DVD-video players, the DVD menu content is programmed to correspond to the buttons on a standard DVD remote.

  What You Need
  Building a DVD requires a little of everything.

  You’ll need image editing software, like Adobe Photoshop, to create menus, backgrounds and buttons. You’ll also need video editing software like Adobe Premiere or Apple Final Cut Pro to prepare your video and audio clips as DVD authoring applications generally aren’t capable of editing video or audio. Finally, you’ll need DVD authoring software, like Sonic Solutions DVDit! or Apple DVD Studio Pro to put it all together. You may need MPEG-2 encoding software and AC-3 encoding software although it’s likely that these tools will come with your DVD authoring application.

  Added up that’s a fair amount of expensive software. If that’s too steep for you, there are cheaper, simplified options for most of the software mentioned above: iMovie instead of Final Cut Pro, iDVD or MyDVD instead of DVD Studio Pro or Sonic DVDit!, and so on. With these applications, you’ll be gaining ease of use and a low (or non-existent) price tag but you’ll be giving up some of the control that professional software offers.

  For hardware, you don’t necessarily need a recordable DVD drive but hopefully you do have a DVD-ROM drive and if not, simply a software-based DVD player, like Apple DVD Player or Windows Media Player to test a virtual DVD after you render it to your hard drive. If you are planning to buy a drive, make sure it’s compatible with the software you’re using. Most software manufacturers publish a list of compatible hardware on their web sites.

  Lastly, whatever the size of your final DVD project is, you’ll need double that in available storage space. So if you’re planning to use all 4.7 GB available on a standard DVD, you’ll need 9.4 GB of storage space in order to create it – 4.7 GB for the source media and associated files and 4.7 GB for the final rendered disk image.

  Short-attention Span Theater
  Once you got all the hardware and software in place, it’s time to choose the elements from your portfolio that you’d like to include on the DVD reel.

  If you’ve never made a demo reel before, you may be wondering what, exactly, belongs on your reel. In general, the idea that “less is more” can work well for a demo reel. Most reels start out with a short montage that gives the viewer a general idea about the kind of work you do, kind of like a commercial that advertises you and your skills. The rest of the reel should contain longer clips and samples of your work. The beauty of DVD is that rather than stringing up your samples in a linear sequence, you can build menus that let the viewer select the clips they’re interested in. A still graphics artist might choose to start with a splash screen instead of a montage and follow that up with a slide show that the viewer can control, or a menu leading to a series of slide shows.

  Up Next
  In the next article in this series, we’ll cover how to determine a structure, design an interface, create still graphics for menus and buttons, and plan for some basic interactivity.

  Read more by Sonja Schenk.