Guide

Page 1Layout and contents are © 2007 Dennis Meuwissen

IntroductionThis short guide describes how to create your own DVD using DVD Flick. It assumes you are familiar with at least basic computer operations such as using a mouse, as well as basic usage of Windows such as selecting a fi le and knowing about fi les and folders.

Project structureA DVD Flick project is built out of titles, video sources, audio tracks, audio sources and subtitles. They relate to each other in the following manner;

Guide

Page 2Layout and contents are © 2007 Dennis Meuwissen

Creating a simple DVD projectStep 1: Add your titlesClick the Add Title button and select one or more of the video fi les that you want to add.

Step 2: Edit your titlesYou can edit each title by double-clicking it or by clicking on it once and pressing the Edit Title button.

Here you can set the number of chapters the title will have, either by entering a number or a time interval. You can also add subtitle fi les, different audio tracks and add another video source to the title.

Step 3: Confi gure your projectClick the Project Settings button on the top to open the project’s settings.The only thing you really need to set here is the Target Size under the General tab, and the Target Format, Encoding Profi le and Second encoding pass under the Video tab.

Guide

Page 3Layout and contents are © 2007 Dennis Meuwissen

For Target Size, choose the size of the disc you will be burning your project onto. Usually the default setting of DVD-5 (4.5 Gb) will be fi ne. For Target Format, you must choose which format is used on the standalone DVD Player you will be watching the DVD on.

For most Europe, Asian, African and Oceanic countries this should be set to PAL, for most American countries to NTSC. Some DVD Players support both formats, in which case you should select the format (most of) your titles were originally encoded from. The best way to see this is if the video runs at 25 frames per second, it is PAL, if it runs on near 24 FPS or near 30 FPS it will be NTSC.

For Encoding Profi le, you must make a trade-off between the time it will take to encode the DVD, or the quality thereof. Generally Fast offers reasonable image quality, the difference with Best is hard to notice. If you are going to make a DVD that is near or over 3 hours in length, it is not recommended to choose Fast but Normal or Best instead or the image quality might suffer.

The second encoding pass option almost doubles the time required to encode, but will yield better distributed bitrate across video, and increases the quality a tiny bit.

Step 4: Choose a destination folderAt the bottom of the screen you can choose where DVD Flick will put the encoded DVD fi les, as well as log fi les of the encoding process.

Step 5: BurningDVD Flick can burn your encoded project straight to disc if it is completed successfully.To enable this, check the Burn project to disc option. Disc label can be set to the label of the disc as displayed by Windows. Be sure to select the right drive to burn to, and to insert an empty disc in it before starting the encoding.

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If you would rather have just an ISO image of the DVD, only check the Create ISO image option, and enter a disc label.

Step 6: EncodingWhen you are all done creating your project, be sure to save it fi rst. Then you can press the Create DVD button and the encoding process will start, providing you have enough free disc space. How long the encoding takes is strongly dependant on the speed of your CPU. It is best to let your PC do this during the night, or during a very long coffee break.

Guide

Page 5Layout and contents are © 2007 Dennis Meuwissen

Combining one or more videos into one titleWhen you have two or more video fi les that split parts of a longer movie, you can combine these together into one title in DVD Flick. The only requirements are that the video fi les all are of the same dimensions and framerate.

To create a title that merges several video fi les, fi rst add the fi rst one in the series of fi les to the project as a title. Then, edit the title and go to the Video sources tab. There all you have to do is simply add the other video fi les in the series using the Add button and they will be appended onto each other.

Note that any audio sources in any of the title’s audio tracks will be moved up or down as well when you move a video source that is in the same fi le.

Guide

Page 6Layout and contents are © 2007 Dennis Meuwissen

Adding subtitlesTo add subtitles to a title, all you have to do is edit the title, go to the Subtitles tab, and use the Add button to add subtitle fi les to the title. You can reorder them using the arrow buttons.

To edit the language, font, font size and positioning of a subtitle select it and press the Edit button. In the window that pops up you can change various properties of the subtitle. When you click the small preview you will see a larger approximation of how the subtitle will look. Try to keep the subtitle inbetween the TV safe borders on the larger preview. A thing called overscan can cause the picture to be slightly cropped when viewed on a TV. The amount of overscan can vary per TV set, so a generous margin of 15% is used in the preview display.

The language setting is simply the language of the subtitle in question. If you do not know about character encoding and character sets, leave the Char. set setting as it is.

Guide

Page 7Layout and contents are © 2007 Dennis Meuwissen

Adding audio tracksA good example for when you want to add another audio track would be to add a second commentary track that you either found or recorded yourself.

After you have added the title, edit it and go to the Audio tracks tab. There you can press the Add button, and then select the audio fi le or another video fi le that you will choose an audio track from. If you chose a video fi le or the fi le you chose has more than one audio track, you will be asked to choose which track to add.