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For those of you who are also aspiring filmmakers, I thought I would take this opportunity to tell you about my recent adventure into the beautiful and exciting world of DVD authoring. I have directed several short films, as well as an award-winning documentary, "Angels of Light." So I decided to put together a reel of my work for publicity and self-marketing purposes.
The first thing I needed to do was get a bigger hard drive and increase my RAM. So instead of replacing my internal hard drive, I decided just to get an external drive. The best deal I could find was a 120 gigabyte hard drive for 150.00. Then I increased my RAM from 256 megabytes to 768 megabytes which cost like eighty bucks. After that, it was time to get some editing software. Now there are all kinds of products on the market for both Windows and Macintosh platforms. For the sake of brevity, if you have a Mac get Final Cut Pro. If you have Windows, get Adobe Premiere, or if your system supports it, I highly recomend Avid Xpress. Because my system wasn't beefy enough, I had to settle for Premiere.
So then it was time to get a DVD burner. Now this is where things can get really confusing because of all the different DVD formats on the market. Just off the top of my head: DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+G, and who knows how many others are out there. I did my research and found out that the best players to get are the ones that can burn DVD-R's. The reason is because those discs play on ninety percent of all DVD set-top players. Why not one hundred percent? Because the technology wasn't introduced until 2002. So any player that is less than two years old should play a DVD-R. Now when you talk about DVD-RW, those things only play on like sixty percent of set-top DVD players. That's a big difference. It was a no-brainer. I bought a Pioneer A05 for $185.00. Just the bare drive without any software or manuals. By doing it that way, I saved myself a good $40! By the way, whenever you buy computer electronics, I highly suggest www.pricewatch.com
Part two to come next week... |
