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by Phil De Lancie
In most respects, the task of authoring a master for DVD has grown far easier in recent years as the available tools have expanded and matured. But the master formats used to output a project and, if needed, send it off to a plant for replication, still present a bit of a dilemma for DVD authoring facilities. In particular, constraints imposed by the available formats often limit the ability to adequately test a title under true playback conditions, a crucial step in ensuring the success of a title. If you output to DLT, your master cannot be directly tested in the set-top players or computer-hosted drives on which the title itself will eventually be played. And if you want to output to DVD-R, you have to limit your target disc to a DVD-5. Four years into what is touted as the most successful consumer electronics launch of all time, there are still many situations in which one has to wait for a check-disc from the plant to truly find out if it all works as planned.
A 9 Gigabyte DVD-R—or 9GB-per-side rewritable DVD—would go a long way toward alleviating this frustration, but unfortunately there's little indication that such a format is on the horizon. For any title larger than DVD-5, then, DLT remains the only practical option for master delivery to the replication plant. For DVD-5s, however, the once-ironclad prohibition on any masters other than DLTs seems to be breaking down, with DVD-Rs now acceptable at some plants for some purposes under some conditions. To understand the reasoning behind these limitations, we start by looking at how different plants process their clients' material from receipt through glass mastering, and then dig into the relative merits of DLT, DVD-R, and other options that may someday have a part to play in the process.
Contents:
— Processing the Master
— Accepting DVD-R
— Relative Reliability
— The Need for Speed
— Rewritables and Networks
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