Posted by WAL on 01/11/97 11:36

Hi There,

My band has just recorded a 30 minute live video on Mini DV which will
be transferred to a DVD by the company responsible for the filming.

The video company don't do duplication and (being cheapskates) ideally,
we don't want to go to the expense of employing a duplicating firm, as
we only need a small number of DVDs for our agents to promote us with.
However, unlike a CD (where you simply put your master copy in the
reader and a blank in your burner to clone it), a little research
suggests that there is a little more to cloning a DVD than I thought.
The size and format issues are all rather confusing and although there
are many websites that discuss this issue, many seem to go into too
much detail and too much jargon and I can't seem to find one that
doesn't assume that the reader has prior knowledge. So I need a little
help please.

I realise that there are copyright implications and that some
commercial DVD releases have copy protection devices built in, but
since we own the copyright this is not an issue in this case. Also, we
don't need to stop the DVD being cloned ourselves, so we don't need to
add any copy protection (in fact we'd probably welcome cloning for the
extra publicity from the wider circulation it would mean that we were
getting).

I have Pinnacle Instant CD and DVD burning software, which was supplied
with a DVD burner that I recently purchased and I'll need to produce
copies of the DVDs that a standard DVD player can read and playback, as
well as DVD's that can be viewed on a PC (for people who want to see it
who don't own a DVD player, but do have a PC).

I need to know how to go about duplicating both data and audio visual
DVDs and whether or not I need to buy any particular size and type of
blank disks, or any more software to do the job. In addition, since the
master DVD will probably be in the form of and Audio / Visual DVD that
can only be viewed on a DVD player (rather than as a datafile which can
be read by a PC), I will also probably need to know how to convert such
a file into something that can be read by my computer and then
duplicated on a data DVD, for playback on a PC.

By the way, if it is a case (as I suspect it will be) of writing the
contents of the master disk to the hard drive before writing it from
memory to a blank (to ensure a fast transfer of data), I have a 320gig
hard drive, so storage shouldn't be an issue for 30 minutes of DVD
video. In addition, my PC is a fairly new and high spec machine, so
processing power and speed shouldn't be an issue either.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in anticipation and sorry if this has been raised elsewhere but
so much has been posted that it's "needle and haystack" time.

WAL

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