Catching the DVD wave

By PETER GRIFFIN

Remember when DVDs (digital versatile/video disks) occupied one lonely little shelf at the local Video Ezy, largely ignored by the masses who queued on Saturday nights to gorge themselves on videotape?

Today that's changed. The DVD format has taken off, with thousands of new and classic movies on the market and every decent flick released from now on guaranteed a spot on the bulging DVD shelves.

Now DVD "burners" are hitting the market, letting us make our own DVDs and take advantage of the disks' superior sound and visual quality and their huge capacity (4.7GB for a typical single-sided disk or enough to hold a feature-length film).

Although they are steeply priced as they debut at the top end of the market, anyone familiar with CD writers knows they first cost as much as $1000 but dropped to about $100 - or were thrown in with most PC bundles - in a couple of years.

Eager to cash in on the demand of the mass market, DVD writer manufacturers will undoubtedly follow the same price-cutting trend.

In the meantime, here's a taste of what early adopters can do:

Equipping yourself: Whether you want to burn your home movies to disks, back up your valuable hard drive files or save your catalogue of yellowing photographs from further deterioration, you'll need to invest in a rewritable DVD drive.

Most of the big computer manufacturers and consumer electronics have DVD writers on the market - from Hewlett-Packard to Dell, Apple to Sony. Standalone writers such as the Philips DVDR 1000 ($4999), act much in the same way as VCRs (video-cassette recorders), plugging into your TV and recording programmes to blank DVDs.

But models aimed at computer users are more useful at this stage. We tried two models - the internal DVRAO4 drive from Pioneer ($1299) and Sony's external drive, the DRX120L ($1999). Sony does an internal model for about $500 less.

Both were easy to install, the Sony model using an i. Link cable to connect to the computer. But beware - not every computer will support this interface.

Pioneer's drive was more fiddly to install, requiring users to delve into the workings of the PC, mount the drive internally and wire it up.

As you would expect, burning large files to disk and working with video on your desktop requires more processing power than tapping out a Word document or surfing the web.

You need a Pentium III with at least 128MB of memory and reasonably modern video graphics to avoid frustrating delays. The bigger your hard drive, the better. Ten minutes of video chewed up over 500MB when we transferred it to hard drive.

Making movies: Using a Sony digital video Handycam ($4299) we set out to make our screen debut, A Day in the Life of a Newspaper.

So it didn't go quite to plan - would-be stars pulled out at the last minute and the realistic NYPD Blue camera shake made for nausea rather than realistic viewing. Still, we came out with enough rough footage for a 10-minute docudrama.

The PC churned away as the video footage was transferred from the camera to the hard drive.

I was then free to use the semi-professional Ulead package DVD Workshop ($749 plus GST) to add all sorts of effects, subtitles and captions and edit out the jerky camera pans and lame antics of my workmates.

All this was done in DVD Workshop through a familiar "wizard" approach in three steps: capture (transfer the video), edit and burn. As with any professional DVD, you can design your own menu system, making it as creative and colourful as you want and allowing viewers to jump to various areas of the disk for a certain piece of footage.

The potential here for the enthusiastic camera buff is huge.

DVD software and media: Thankfully, you don't have to invest hundreds of dollars in the likes of DVD Workshop to transfer a simple movie to DVD.

Most DVD burners come with their own software packages allowing you to do the basics in editing video and mastering DVDs and transferring files to DVD using drag-and-drop applications.

Sony delivers an impressive software lineup with its drive. Mediostream's NeoDVD allows you to author DVD movies. B'Clip allows background packet writing, and CyberLink's PowerDVD is a versatile DVD player.

Pioneer has a similar bundle but wins on the video editing side with Arcsoft Snowbiz.

US company Sonic has licensed its MyDVD software, which is a user-friendly bundle aimed at the non-technical user, to the likes of Hewlett-Packard.

More sophisticated software has proliferated as computer users turn their spare rooms into homemade editing suites.

Apart from the programs allowing you to play with video, you will receive as part of your package software allowing the transfer of data files, still images or audio clips to DVD. The disks are an ideal medium for backing up your hard drive, which you can do using just four single-sided disks for a 40GB hard drive. The 4.7GB disks retail for around $40 each. As with CD-R and CD-RW disks, the price will drop with the price of the writers.

Standards wars: Out there in DVD land, the war is still being waged between the various technology companies and the different DVD standards they back.

At the moment, DVD+RW, DVD-RW and DVD-RAM are jostling for position and there is no clear leader.

The backers of the DVD+RW format, one of which is Sony, boast that disks created in these drives are replayable on most computer DVD drives and the set-top DVD video players in millions of living rooms worldwide.

Quality-wise, there didn't seem to be much difference between Sony and Pioneer, although the Sony DVD+RW drive seemed to write to disk slightly faster.

The DVD-RAM and DVD-RW/-R formats are pushed by the DVD Consortium, which has Hitachi, Pioneer, and Panasonic as key members.

DVD-RAM disks can be read only by DVD-RAM drives, and customer feedback indicates they have problems on legacy DVD players.

Compatibility is the big issue. There's no point making your home movie and sending it to relatives only for their DVD drive to reject the disk. The key is to buy carefully and do your research - don't let a pushy salesman win you over only to leave you with an incompatible DVD drive.

Medio Stream

Arcsoft

Sonic

Imaging Technology

DVD + RW

DVD Forum

DVD plus RW