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Page 1 of 5: Introduction + Inputs
PowerProducer 4 is Cyberlink's DVD authoring software. PowerProducer allows you to author DVDs with menus and other advanced features, while streamlining the process to be simple enough for the average home user. In addition to DVD authoring, PowerProducer also supports Blu-ray and HD DVD authoring (although this guide does not cover these topics).
This guide is aimed at users new to DVD authoring, but is already fairly comfortable with things like video conversion and editing and know about basic DVD structures like Titles and Chapters.
PowerProducer is missing several useful features when it comes to DVD authoring, including multiple audio track support, subtitle support and VOB importing without re-encoding. Read our DVD Authoring Tools Roundup to find out which DVD authoring tool is best for your needs.
Software you'll need:
Step 1: Checking your input files
Before you load your inputs into PowerProducer, it is best to make sure that these input files are all of the same system (PAL or NTSC). As a rule, files that are 23.976, 24, 29.97 or 30 frame per second are NTSC. While PAL video is at 25 FPS. Multiples of these frame rates (eg. 15 FPS and 60 FPS => NTSC) are sometime used as well. There are many ways to check for the frame rate of your video file, for example, using GSpot for AVI files. I prefer to organise my videos before even starting PowerProducer, so I will know beforehand what kind of DVD I am making. Normally, your video player software will also show you the frame rate of the file. For example, in Windows Media Player, you can find out the frame rate of the video by accessing the "Statistics" options from the "View" menu, go to the "Advanced" tab and the "frame rate" will be displayed there.
If you are using Media Player Classic, you can find out the frame rate by going to the "File" menu, selecting "Properties", go to the "Details" tab and the FPS will be shown there (the screenshot below shows: "Video: MPEG4 Video (H264) 720x384 25.00fps [Video]").
Another method to find out details about your video file, that will work for almost any kind of video file, is to use MediaInfo. Simply download and install MediaInfo, load in your video file, and the details about the video will be shown, including the framerate (fps).
Once you have found out the frame rates of your video files, separate the NTSC and PAL ones, as you do not want to mix them together when making a single DVD. You should probably also separate the widescreen and full-frame videos. So each DVD you make should only contain widescreen PAL, widescreen NTSC, full-frame PAL or full-frame NTSC content. It's also probably a good idea now to check your input video to see if they have any audio synch issues, and fix them before loading them into PowerProducer.
