Chapter Breaks in DVD Videos

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.