DVD Encoding
We've been burning DVD's and VCD's here at work for a while. Some of the things we've leard are:
1) In creating movies, the transfer rate of your hard drive is way more important than your videocard. The videocard is important in playback, unless it is also your input source, then its real important.
If your video starts getting jerky, you're "dropping frames"; the transfer rate between your hard drive and you system bus is most likely the problem. The fast, easy, and inexpensive solution is a faster controller card. Promise Technologies makes one of the more popular models. The one offered by Maxtor is made by Promise. It is the only model that supports the super big 250 gig range hard drives without a problem.
Also, when upgrading your hard drive controller, make sure you use the 80 pin shielded IDE cable instead of the regualar 40 pin IDE cable. The regular cable will cause your machine to dummy down from ATA 133 to ATA 33.
You can go SCSI or Serial ATA, but no need to be crazy
2) Contigous hard drive space, and lots of it. Best practice, dedicate a drive to rendering (\buffering\compiling). The bigger the better. Also look into disk management software like Diskeeper
3) Memory. Lots of it.
4) Codecs. Make sure you use the right codec for what you want to accomplish. There are plenty of utilities that help you manage your codecs, and that explain what they all do.
5) You don't need a DVD-R\RW\+R\-R to burn movies. Roxio EZ CD Creator Pro 5+ will allow you to burn VCDs, making a CD that will play in other people's computers, as well as their home DVD players.
Check out
http://dvd.box.sk/]DVD.Box.sk[/URL] for lots of great codecs, faq's, reviews, etc. You may get an unwanted popup or two, but the information there is more than you ever dreamed of.
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