Topic: CD/DVD labels + ULEAD DVD WORKSHOP IS FREAKING GARBAGE.

[Quemaqua]

So basically I'm making some DVDs as Christmas gifts, and there's going to end up being a pretty good lot of them.  I wanted to do them up right with actual proper labels on the DVDs themselves (including some cover art for the boxes I'm going to put them in), but I've looked around briefly and this is going to end up costing me as much as like buying a bunch of shit at a store, which was the whole thing I was trying to avoid because I really don't have any money.  One place wanted like 35 bucks for 5 DVDs, which is pointless because that's in the vicinity of 30 bucks a person (there's 4 disks per package, and I'm giving out at least 3).

So... anybody know anything about this?  I've never done anything of the kind before, but I put so much effort into making the DVDs themselves that I'd really like to finish this stuff off properly if at all possible.

Is it possible to just make something up digitally then take it to a print shop and have sticky labels printed or something?  Because something like that would be even better.  I plan to put these up as torrents, and I'd like to get the labels and covers up with the actual DVD content so that people who download the stuff can print all the niceties out and use them as well.

EDIT - See posts below for frustration with software.

[Cobra951]

You can buy DVD labels to print on, and several programs allow you to format images for such printouts.  The paper will be 8.5x11" with 2 stamped labels on it.  Thebacking peels off and you stick it.  Simple.  Don't know more details, because the only time I dealt with this was at a print shop.

[TheOtherBelmont]

You can buy DVD labels to print on, and several programs allow you to format images for such printouts.  The paper will be 8.5x11" with 2 stamped labels on it.  Thebacking peels off and you stick it.  Simple.  Don't know more details, because the only time I dealt with this was at a print shop.

Memorex and some other companies make these.  You can buy a starter kit for like $10-20 depending on where you go that has some paper with the labels cut out, a program, and a plastic thing to rest the CD label on so you can line it up just right.  The refills are pretty cheap too.

[Quemaqua]

I sort of figured there might be something like that, but my admittedly minimal searching didn't reveal much right away.  So thanks for the info.  I'm trying to make this as painless on myself as possible due to how long it's ended up taking me, heh.  I'll look into it a bit more and see if I can't find a decent program that will do this (or see if maybe there's a PSP plugin or something), then I can hopefully just take the stuff to a print shop and get it all done on the cheap!  Proper postery backing for the cases is probably going to be the most costly part, aside from the cases themselves, since I'll want to print those up nice, and if I do anything extra with that stuff (make a proper case with a backing and stuff that looks nice or whatever), that'll be more effort... eh.  I'll figure it out.

EDIT - God damn it, this is getting annoying.  I just finally burned the last DVD, which I was having big problems with, and it didn't come out right at all!  The audio is out of fucking sync with the video on the final episode of the show, and several of the videos which were letterboxed are now full screened for no reason at all, which makes no sense because I ripped them from the same material and then converted them... and all the conversions turned out fine, but when Ulead did it and burned the DVD, half of them were letterboxed and half weren't.

Fucking hell I hate this program.  What is it's problem?  Why is my episode audio screwed up when everything else is fine?  IS THERE ANOTHER PROGRAM THAT ISN'T BRAINDEAD?!

[scottws]

Yeah I don't like Ulead much.  Adobe Premiere is the most powerful, but I like Nero Vison, which is part of Nero 7 & 8 Ultimate (along with Nero Cover Designer).  It's easy and it works.  Also has some pretty decent wipes and transitions.

[Quemaqua]

I'm trying Adobe Encore.  Tried Roxio's thing and that was shit.  Couldn't even do motion menus.  If Encore fails, I'll try Nero.  I have Nero 6, sadly.  But I'll figure something out.  I just hate to redo all the damned work I did with Ulead.

[scottws]

Well I don't do menus, so I'm not sure what sort of features Nero Vision has related to that.

[Quemaqua]

That's 95% of my problem.  I'm doing nice menus with backgrounds, music, and motion buttons.  Ulead does it all very easily, but then apparently can't so much as even convert the fucking videos properly.  It didn't like the format my original AVIs were in (which I had converted directly from the VOBs using AutoGK and no other program had any issue with them), so I had to re-encode them with a different audio format, and then it did half of them letterbox the way it did and somehow unsynced the audio and video of the one TV episode I had on there (the rest were extras from the internet and other places) even though it did the other 12 episodes fine from what I could tell.  Ugh.  I just wish it worked, because I got used to the slight wonkiness of the program and managed to make some decent looking stuff with it.  Which I now have to undo.

[gpw11]

Ok, this is pretty unrelated, but what was the name of that technology that allowed you to burn images on to the actual disks?

[idolminds]

LightScribe

[scottws]

That's 95% of my problem.  I'm doing nice menus with backgrounds, music, and motion buttons.  Ulead does it all very easily, but then apparently can't so much as even convert the fucking videos properly.  It didn't like the format my original AVIs were in (which I had converted directly from the VOBs using AutoGK and no other program had any issue with them), so I had to re-encode them with a different audio format, and then it did half of them letterbox the way it did and somehow unsynced the audio and video of the one TV episode I had on there (the rest were extras from the internet and other places) even though it did the other 12 episodes fine from what I could tell.  Ugh.  I just wish it worked, because I got used to the slight wonkiness of the program and managed to make some decent looking stuff with it.  Which I now have to undo.

If you're going DVD to DVD, which it sounds like, I would avoid converting to an MPEG-4 format (DivX, XviD, H.264) and just work in the MPEG-2 realm, cutting and pasting what you need.   It will result in much better image quality in the end.

[Quemaqua]

I don't know much about this stuff, unfortunately.  I ended up using DivX with AutoGK because a bit of quality loss was more or less irrelevant.  And I'm not really going DVD to DVD.  I'm basically putting a bunch of low quality TV episodes I downloaded on the internet (the Polish-only Wiedzmin -- aka Witcher -- show) together with some other stuff from the game.  The Witcher game's making-of DVD that came with the Limited Edition was terrible, and featured much less than what they'd already shown in previews on the internet.  So I ripped the DVD, converted the VOBs, then put them into a menu option with Ulead, spliced together with a bunch of what I got on the internet.  The program then automatically converted it all so it could be watched together as chapters (though it did them as separate titles instead of chapters of the same title, which was my own problem), but for some reason half of the videos (the ones from the VOBs) unletterboxed while the others didn't.  I checked the options to make sure there wasn't a setting off somewhere, and I still can't figure out why it did it.  Plus the thing takes a million years to convert and has such stupid quality options that are global for the whole project instead of individual parts of it.  And I have no idea how it's possible the the audio got unsynced with the last episode since it's the same file format as the other episodes and those all converted just fine.

[Cobra951]

I remember Ulead not doing widescreen at all.  Sad limitation.  The audio sync problem is often related to frame-rate differences between source and destination.  Another bit of idiocy that always pisses me off.  The audio timeline should be mated to the video timeline, like braided strands on a rope.  There should be some mechanism in the data streams to ensure sync moment to moment, and I cannot believe that we've made it to 2007 without this stupid problem being solved by default.  The two streams are separated and processed as if they had nothing to do with each other, and then recombined as a last step.  It's a wonder they're ever in sync.

[Quemaqua]

Indeed.  I'm hoping I can somehow figure out a way to nail down the problem because I've tried several other DVD authoring tools now and they all suck.  Either super, horrendously complicated because they're professional tools, or way too simple so they don't even offer the basic functionality I'm really looking for.  Ulead seems to be the best middle ground I can find, but it's got this horrible issue that makes me want to drive a spike through my head.  Arg.  Christmas presents may turn out to suck this year after all.

[scottws]

I remember Ulead not doing widescreen at all.  Sad limitation.  The audio sync problem is often related to frame-rate differences between source and destination.  Another bit of idiocy that always pisses me off.  The audio timeline should be mated to the video timeline, like braided strands on a rope.  There should be some mechanism in the data streams to ensure sync moment to moment, and I cannot believe that we've made it to 2007 without this stupid problem being solved by default.  The two streams are separated and processed as if they had nothing to do with each other, and then recombined as a last step.  It's a wonder they're ever in sync.

It's a problem of the AVI container, which was created way before 2007.  That's why we've moved onto better containers like OGM, MKV, and MP4.

[Cobra951]

With all due respect, it's a problem with converting one form of AV into another, regardless of age.  The transcoding software has all the information it needs.  It should add timecodes to the data streams as it splits them, then scale the streams to each other as it transcodes.  In practice, the audio would be the master, with synching being left to duplicating, discarding or blending video frames.  This is not a cakewalk, and it is not well-suited to grabbing unrelated splitters, codecs and joiners and throwing together a cheap transcoder.  But it can and should be done in all commercial products.