Why No Standard DVD Delivery Label?

[Bill Davis]

I was participating in a thread on another forum where a guy was lamenting the fact that he delivered a DVD to a trade show and it looked terrible during projection.

He got the disc back and it looked fine on his system.

That happens sometimes. And it's up to him and the projection people to figure out what happened.

But it struck me that since we can all now put lots of different data on a DVD - in multiple formats. Perhaps it's time for me to start thinking about developing my own label that will HELP my clients understand what I put on the darn discs I deliver.

After 5 minutes of fiddling around, I came up with this.

Wondering what anyone thinks. I'm positive I missed a bunch of useful information - but was trying to keep it relatively simple.

Any suggestions?

[Shaun Roemich]

Total Run Time? An eloquent take on a video slate, Bill.

[Richard Alvarez]

I put most of that on the label, but I think what you're dealing with is someone who fails to set up the PROJECTOR correctly. It's not color balanced, the gama is off, or perhaps some other problem creeps in. There are so many things that can go wrong with a poorly set up projector (Including an under powered projector trying to throw too far.)

A picture that looks fine on a monitor 24 inches from your face in an editing suite, may not hold up on a poorly adjusted inexpensive projector at a trade show.

[Shaun Roemich]

I've found from personal experience that proper attention to levels, especially highlights (keep your whites below 100) USUALLY helps with projection. ASSUMING of course that the projector is set up properly and is of adequate quality.

We had a multimedia guy at my last 9-5 that insisted on trying to produce a video for a high profile presenter. He was a web guy and didn't think that the "rules" of video applied to him because he was "producing on a computer for display on a computer projector". Well, he forgot about the intermediate step: the output to video so that it could be displayed. Highlights went superwhite and completely blew out the gamma curve. Thankfully, this was a dry run the day before the presenter needed the project done. Brought the project back, showed him how to use the 3 way colour corrector and the video went off without a hitch the next day.

[Bill Davis]

Originally Posted by Shaun Roemich

Total Run Time? An eloquent take on a video slate, Bill.

Excellent point, Shaun.

I think I'll replace the R with runtime since that's probably the most important single piece of information a disc user needs up front.

Thank you.

[Ben Longden]

Sometimes the projectionist dosent PLAY the disc, but copies the thing to the hard drive and plays that.

In those cases, I supply the client with a DVD and a DVD-ROM, containing the project as a standalone MPEG2 file so that can be copied across.

Ben

BTW; LOVE the 'sticker', Bill. I might just plagiarise that.... ;)

[Giroud Francois]

well raster format defined as NTSC is not very ok.
You should either say 30p ou 60i because NTSC is not really a raster format.

Encoding: Since your DVD is really mpeg2, this entry is either useless or misleading.
Format of screen: you should say "apect ration" and give both number 1.77 (16x9)
since you could get 16x9 in a 4/3 letterboxed format or even 2.35 format that will fill neither a 4x3 screen nor a 16x9 one.
Audio: your example is bit misleading since you indicate 2 tracks and add mono.
just saying stereo or mono would be enough since i doubt somebody would be torn enough to provide purposedly a DVD with mono track only on one channel.

[Taky Cheung]

I don't quite get this. If this is an authored DVD, does that mean it's a DVD-video compliance disc? If so,

How does DV-NTSC can be 25mbps? Isn't DVD standard data rate is up to 9.8mbps?

[Shaun Roemich]

Taky: I think the idea there is to identify the originating format (DV, DigiBeta, 16mm film...)

[Edward Phillips]

Don't forget to put "This side up" ;)

[Vince Pachiano]

Originally Posted by Edward Phillips

Don't forget to put "This side up" ;)

Laugh if you want, but I had a client give me a CD-R of images for inclusion on a DVD.
She wrote the title of the CD with a Sharpie marker on the Data side.

Of course, it could not initially be read...
A little bit of aqua-net hair-spray and a soft-cloth, and all was well

When I gave her the CD back, I wrote on the Front of the CD: Write on THIS side
On the data side, near the outer edge I wrote: NOT this side
LOL

[Ben Longden]

A blonde, perhaps?

:)

Ben