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Mastering DVDs

Homemade DVDs don't have to look homemade. Here's how to create slick discs that hold more than video and that work in any player.

Edward B. Driscoll, Jr.

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Photograph by Chip Simons

Photograph: Chip Simons
So you've got a digital camcorder and you know how to use it. That's the easy part. Even the task of editing your footage down to a tight, entertaining movie isn't terribly difficult, especially if you use novice-oriented software like Adobe Premiere Elements.

But to wow friends and family with your sharp cinematic skills, you'll want to produce a DVD with all the trimmings: professional-looking menus plus photo slide shows and bonus features. For this project, we'll use Adobe Premiere Elements to produce a "season highlights" DVD to share with members of a soccer team.

If you scout around, you'll find plenty of DVD authoring packages on the market that can help you produce a nice-looking digital video disc. In this how-to, we'll be using Premiere Elements because it's reasonably inexpensive ($100) and its video editing tools are easy to master; a further advantage is that you can use a single application for all the steps from transferring video from your camcorder to your PC through burning the final product to DVD. The basic steps involved in making a polished disc, however--assembling and organizing its content (including the already-edited video), choosing what goes into the menus, customizing the look of the menus, and burning your disc--are similar for most other DVD-authoring apps as well.

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