The easiest way, by far, to create a VCD in Easy CD Creator 5 is by using the wizard. You can give up the wizard at a later date once you've created a few VCD's and are quite comfortable with the process.
To begin, start Easy CD Creator's VCD Creator or by selecting it from the Project Selector. Go to Start => Programs => Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 => Applications => Video CD Creator. Easy CD Creator should launch with the VCD wizard. If it does not, go to File => Preferences and make sure both Show Startup Window and Open Disc Wizard are checked. Hit "OK", close the application and re-launch it. The wizard should now be available.
The first screen is just an introductory screen - click next to bypass it and go on to the next screen.
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Step 1 Setup your VCD This screen allows for the setup of your VCD. The VCD 2.0 spec allows for creating VCD's with a simple quasi-interactive menu sequence (similar to DVD's) or a Simple Video sequence. (VCD 1.1 specs) The menu structure is similar to the DVD menu concept. A movie clip or still works as a menu showing the user choices of movies they can watch. Whereas the simple video sequence will play a sequence of videos one after another without any user interaction. For our purposes at the moment, select Simple Video Sequence and hit "Next" |
Step 2 Adding Items to your VCD The next window will prompt you to Add Play items. These are the video files you wish to burn to a VCD. Click the Add button. A new window will appear allowing you to navigate and select the files you wish. You can only select one file at a time so to add files you'll need to continue hitting the Add button and going through the process untill all your files are in the media bin. When done hit the Next button.
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Each time you add an item to the VCD layout the Add New Play Item dialog box appears. In the video clip preview area you can set the start frame for a clip to use as a catalog item (more on this later) Click on the Video tab and make sure there is a check next to the NTSC (352 x 240 / 29.97 Hz) is checked. Hit OK to return to adding play items |
Step 3 Create a Play Sequence Now you'll be prompted to create a play sequence. This is nothing more than telling Easy CD Creator in what order the files should play. Even if you have only one file, you'll still need to add it to the play sequence.
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To create the play sequence, select the video clip on the left side of the screen and click Add You'll see the clip transfer over to the other side of the window. It's pretty straight-forward here, click the clip you want to start off with and just keep going. If you make a mistake, select the clip and hit Remove. If you realized you've left a clip or two out, don't worry. You can still add more media by clicking on the Add File button. When you're finished with your play sequence, hit Next. |
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Step 4 Burn the VCD The next screen allows you to "preview" your VCD. Give it a shot just to make sure you're happy with the final product before burning to CD. Hit Next again and the screen on the left will appear. For our purposes here, select Create CD Now and hit finish. Easy CD Creator is priming the file to be burned and the screen below will show. |
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This is the last screen that you'll see before you're off and burning your VCD. I would suggest setting the record options and record method as I have here. I pretty much know that my CD burner works and don't need a test before each and every burn. If it bombs out, I might select that. As a general rule I don't like to leave my CD's open. I like to finalize the CD. I have no need to add files once I've burned it. Furthermore, some machines will not read CD's that are not finalized. |
That's it to creating a simple VCD using the wizard. Next we'll explore creating VCD's with menus.
The concept of a menu in a VCD is slightly different from one you might find in a DVD. A DVD menu is interactive - the user uses the DVD remote to select menu choices, hits play and the selection is played. A menu in a DVD is not interactive - it more or less shows the user what choices he/she has available, the user then makes choice via the keypad on the remote to begin the clips. Even though the VCD menu isn't interactive, it's still nice to be able have a custom-made menu screen.
Again, the easiest way to do this is to use the wizard in Easy CD Creator. To begin, start as you did before; launch the VCD creator and bypass the first screen. This time, instead of selecting a "Simple Video Sequence" as you did above (see first image) select the "One Level Menu Structure" option and hit "Next".
Add play items and configure them as you did in the previous example. However, when planning to create a VCD with a menu you'll have to do a bit of planning. Basically, you will need to create the following things: a start play sequence, menu pages, and of course the main content of the VCD - the video clips.
Start Play sequences are primarily what they sound like. They are the clips or items that play automatically or at start of the VCD. If you've seen a DVD, you've no doubt seen start play sequences. These are the clips that play automatically as the DVD is inserted in the drive. For example, they could be FBI copyright notices, company logos, introductory clips or anything that plays before you're taken to the main menu.
Menu pages are just static images that contain a listing of the menu choices the user has. For the most part, you can create an image in Photoshop made up of still shots from the video clips or a simple text based menu that says "Press 1 to see Clip 1" and so on. NOTE: A tip on creating menu items - start with a new document in Photoshop with a dimension of 640 x 480 and keep most of the content towards the middle of the image. If you don't do this, you'll notice that part of the images/menu will be cut off. When you've created the image, import it into Video Factory and make a 5 second movie out of it. Export it and you're ready to use it as a VCD menu.
Once you've added all the video clips needed you'll go to the next screen that lays out what has to be done next: create the play start sequence, create the menu pages, create aliases to the clips so that when button 1 is pressed the user will see clip 1.
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This is the screen where you will select what clip is going to play immediately as the VCD is inserted. This works as adding media - select the clip on the left and then hit the "Add" button. You can have more that one clip play if you wish, just keep adding media into the "START_SEQUENCE" area. The order in which they appear will be the play order of the clips. Remember, this is introductory material ONLY. Don't use your main media here. Next, you'll move onto your menu |
If you follow the on-screen instructions throughout this wizard you should be okay! Just take your time, read everything, think about how you want to plan it out - ahead of time.
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When creating a menu in Easy CD Creator, your menu must be in an "MPEG" format. Again, this is a simple process. Just take your stills and convert them as a movie in an application like iMovie or Video Factory ahead of time. The menu item (clip) comes from the media pool as you added clips in step 1. If you need to add more clips you can do so by using the Add from file button. |
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Menus are nothing more than a listing of available movie clips. Set the number of menu choices available to the number of clips represented at this level of the menu. TIP: Make sure you have all of your clips represented at the menu level. For example, if you have 10 movie clips but only 8 clips show on the menu, you user might never know about the 2 extra clips. If you don't have enough room, you can make a secondary menu to carry the rest of the clips Set the number of menu choices and hit "Next" |
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This next screen is where you set up a "Play Sequence" for each menu choice. If you wish you can change the name of the play sequence, but it's not needed. Each menu choice gets a play sequence. Each play sequence can have more than one clip if you wish. We'll be setting up the clips in just a moment. The way I've set it up is that button 1 is linked to play_sequence 1 which I've renamed as clip 1. |
Hitting "Next" when you're done will take you to the next screen which allows you to add another menu sequence if you wish. If you don't need another menu, just hit "Next" to bypass it. The screen after that will allow us to setup what clips play with each play sequence.
Make sure you assign clips to the correct sequence. This, by far, is the most difficult thing to keep track of when creating a VCD with a menu. Each time you hit "Next" you will advance to the next play sequence. When you've finished adding clips, you'll come to a window that will ask if you want to playback your VCD. Now might be a good time to check out if you've done your work correctly. Give it a shot and fix what needs to be fixed.
Hitting "Next" at this screen will take you to the same set of screens that we encountered in step 4 above.
That's it in a nutshell for creating VCD's with menus. And guess what? Since VCD's burn using standard CD-R's. Mistakes are quite cheap. Don't be afraid to experiment - you're only out at the most 50 cents for a screwed up VCD. :)
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