4

Determining Your Target Audience and Playback Device
As with any media project, you must have a clear idea of who the viewers are and what
their expectations will be. You may need to create a title that simply plays a movie as
soon as the DVD is loaded, with no viewer interaction at all. Or, you may need to create
a title with highly customizable languages or display types.
Another major consideration is whether your DVD will be played on a computer. When
a DVD is played on a set-top DVD player, the arrow buttons on the remote control provide
the primary navigation controls. However, when a DVD is played on a computer, viewers
typically use the pointer for navigation. This distinction affects menu designs because
you need to make it obvious where viewers should click to activate the buttons.
Additionally, if you need the title to play on older computers, you may need to set the
bit rate as low as possible, to increase the chances that the title will play without stuttering.
Deciding Which DVD Standard to Use
DVD Studio Pro gives you the choice of authoring a traditional DVD using standard
definition (SD) assets or a DVD using high definition (HD) assets. There are several factors
to take into account when deciding which DVD format to use:
• While an HD-based DVD can provide an excellent HD video output, it can only be played
on devices designed specifically to support it, such as the Apple DVD Player. SD-based
DVDs can be played on all DVD players, including those that play HD-based DVDs.
• An HD project can be written on either a red laser disc (as is used by SD projects) or
on a blue laser disc. While SD-based DVD players can read red laser discs, they cannot
play HD content from them.
Important: Only HD projects on special 3x DVD-ROM red laser media are officially
supported in the HD DVD specification. You can burn HD projects to traditional red
laser media on your system; however, the discs might not play in all HD DVD players.
• Blue laser discs can hold about three times the data that a red laser disc can hold (a
single-layer red laser disc can hold 4.7 GB—a single-layer blue laser disc can hold 15 GB).
Because you can use SD video in your HD project, writing on a blue laser disc allows
you to get much more content on the disc.
• You may need to author both SD-based and HD-based DVD versions of your project.
The easiest way to do this is to first author the SD-based DVD version of the project.
You can then set the DVD standard to HD DVD—DVD Studio Pro automatically converts
the project—and you can then choose which QuickTime assets to encode to the HD
format. Alternatively, you can swap SD assets with HD assets as needed.
34 Chapter 2 Planning Your Project