Chapter Breaks in DVD Videos

sbennett — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:18:48 +0000

A chapter break is a “marker” on a DVD that tells the DVD player places to skip to in the recording. When you buy a movie on DVD and hit the “skip” button on your remote the DVD player automatically moves you to where the movie makers specified the next chapter break. Additionally, these chapter breaks show up on the menu for the movie (usually under “scene selection”).

When you’re doing a video to DVD or film to DVD transfer, you are likely going to be able to fit in more than one of your original films or tapes onto the DVD because the DVD can store about 2 hours of video. Almost all 8mm and 16mm films are much shorter and many video tapes are shorter, too. To make it easy to navigate so that you can easily find the clip you are looking for when you decide to watch your old movies, you should include chapter breaks on the DVD at the start of each film or clip that you have transferred to the disk.

When doing video to DVD film transfer, if you have shorter films, especially the length of old 8mm films, then you are going to have a real need to insert chapter breaks into your DVD menus. Otherwise, every time you watch your DVD you are going to either have to watch the entire movie in sequence or you are going to have to manually fast forward through the film until you find the spot that you want. Most of the time when we watch a home movie, we aren’t interested in watching a long presentation. Instead, we’re more interested in showing a specific clip to friends or relatives; something that makes a few of these chapter break markers important.

If you want to put in a chapter break when doing video to DVD film transfer, you’re going to need DVD authoring software. There are different approaches to this that range from easy to use but limited programs like iMovie and iDVD on the Macintosh, to programs that are more professional, such as Adobe Premier. A DVD authoring program will not only allow you to put chapter markers into your DVDs so that you can navigate them easily, but it will also allow you to build in full menus like you see on commercial DVDs. You will also be able to do things like customize backgrounds for the menus and name the chapters for easier navigation.

When we transfer your film to DVD or video to DVD, we can add chapter breaks to the resulting DVDs. Please ask if you would like more information on this great addition to the basic transfer of your memories to DVD.

Film Transfer to DVD

sbennett — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:21:33 +0000

Of all the services that we provide, I think that the 8mm and 16mm film transfer service is my favorite. I received an email message this morning that typifies the response to seeing the results of our film transfer service:

Steve, Just wanted to send you a quick email to let you know how wonderful it was to see my families faces while they were viewing the movies your company has transferred for us! The dvd’s came out awesome! I really couldn’t have asked for anything better considering what you had to work with. I am so pleased with the quality and thank you very much. After everything settles down with the holidays I’ll start sending you all my videos to be transferred to dvd. Again, thank you very much!

Cecelia

I think that these 8mm film transfers are successful for several reasons:

Easy Accessibility: In many cases, the people for whom we do these transfers haven’t seen the movies in ages – or in the case of younger relatives, perhaps ever! Hence any way to view them is fantastic. The DVDs are easy to view by almost everybody. They can be pulled out and viewed on a whim without a lot of effort. This definitely wasn’t true for the 8mm films!
Easy Sharing: The ease of use of these DVDs make them great for showing at family gatherings (as Cecelia indicates above). This is a great way to get the younger parts of the family interested in the lives of their parents and grandparents. These DVDs are easy to duplicate for the rest of the family. This is particularly important since many of these films are being inherited by one of the children or grandchildren; sharing with the whole family is easy and inexpensive (which it definitely was not with the 8mm film).
High quality video: I am continually surprised by the quality of the video we get out of these tiny films. I often tell people that the film will look better than it has in years (maybe ever) but that we can’t duplicate the sound of the projector and the heat of the fan! The quality is often better than video from VHS and Hi8 video tapes that are decades newer. That is not to say that I am disappointed with the quality of our VHS/etc. transfers – rather, the quality of the video is often poor on these analog video tapes compared to the images on 8mm films.
Better Source Material: Having grown up with easy to shoot and inexpensive video tapes, we have grown accustomed to home movies that are long and, let’s face it, extremely boring. Who really wants to sit through an hour of watching the family open Christmas presents? 8mm film, on the other hand, was (relatively) expensive. Hence people shooting these movies were very conservative regarding when (and for how long) they squeezed the button to shoot. As a result, the films are short and sweet with very little “waste”. This is refreshing. It also means that transferring these films is very cost effective — every foot of film is the good stuff, so you don’t feel like you are paying for long shots of dad’s feet.

Digitizing The World » film transfer

Chapter Breaks in DVD Videos

Film Transfer to DVD