Subtitles of the Movie

If you're like me, you primarily buy DVDs for the special features. Chances are you've already seen the movie in the theater and you just can't wait to see how Lord of the Rings was put together. How did they put Gollum together? How did they animate him and texture him and let's see the voice actor who's doing their stuff. I'm a big fan of that stuff and I will always, always buy the super-duper-ultra-deluxe special edition of a DVD just so I can watch those special features and get my little figurine and whatever action comes with it and I just get all happy when I get that kind of stuff. So let's talk about quality versus quantity when it comes to you building a DVD. Now, you might want to give your viewers tons and tons and tons and tons of special features, but you only have enough money to put it on a regular DVD. So you're going to have to decide what to leave out or you can let Encore do the transcoding for you, which will allow you to put a lot of stuff on there but Encore's going to slowly but surely degrade quality as you add more stuff and content. I'm going to right click in my Project Panel on one of the files I have here and I'm going to just show you that I can choose Transcode Settings and I can see that the Quality Preset is on Automatic, which once again means that Encore is in charge. It's going to automatically compress everything for me based on my content and the more I add, the more it's going to look at what I'm doing and decide what quality to put it on. Likewise, if I choose one of these myself, let's talk about what these mean here. We see we have some initials: VBR Two Pass and CBR One Pass. Well, we have a constant bit rate and a variable bit rate. Now, with variable, you're going to get a much better quality because what happens with the two pass thing here, Encore is going to watch your entire content one time and it's going to determine alright, well, in this shot there's mostly buildings there. Not much is happening so I can really compress this. But in this scene, there's a really good fight scene and lots of explosions and all kinds of back flips and acrobatics going on so I'm going to not compress this as much so I can get the best quality in this action. So when it does that, it's going to go over twice and then it's going to confirm that and it's going to give you this high quality, which means you're not going to be able to put that much stuff on there. So with a constant bit rate, it's going to do one pass and it's going to simply say alright, I'm going to compress absolutely everything at the same exact compression rate. So you're going to have either great quality for a short film or medium quality for a whole bunch of content and that's pretty general. I mean, there's a lot more to it, but that's the general idea as to what's happening. I'm going to cancel this here and I'm going to go back to my Build Menu and I'm going to maximize this frame and show you that it also keeps track of your information. It tells you how much space is going to be used so far on your production and how much space on the DVD is left over and you can see here that I have a one-sided 4.7 gigabyte, which is a pretty much a regular single-layer DVD. If I want to add more stuff, I have to buy the dual-layer ones so that I can put more content on there. And, of course, if I'm doing Blu-ray, I could put a kabillion tons of stuff on there. So I can have, like, 25, like, gigabytes as you see down here. So I have 1.65 gigabytes used of 23 free. So I could put all kinds of special features and slideshows and audio and interviews and all kinds of great stuff on a Blu-ray disk that I simply could not put on a regular DVD, whether it is a single-sided or a dual-sided double format dual-layer with double stuff cream filling. As you can see, there's all kinds of crazy stuff going on with the formats. But chances are good you're going to be doing it with a regular, standard DVD or at least a dual-layer one. So keep that in mind and you want to put less stuff with high-quality or more stuff with medium quality. That's always going to be the battle you're going to have when it comes to authoring DVD content.