iPod Fans

Watching self-made DVDs can be very enjoyable. But the final quality may not be as good as we thought it would be due that the process of making your own DVD might not be very professional. So here comes the question of how to edit a half-prepared DVD movie, say a DVD taken by DVD camcorder, to a high quality DVD.

In fact, this is not complicated. All you need to do is the following two steps:

1. Re-edit your DVD movie on your computer.
2. Burn the optimized DVD movie to a new DVD disc.

My OS is Mac, so everything below is based on Mac OS.

Firstly, edit your DVD and put it on your computer. The moving editing tool that I am using is Wondershare DVD Ripper for Mac. This software is actually for converting DVD to many players such as iPod, iPhone, Zune, PSP, mobile phones etc…, but it also has very useful DVD editing functions including adjusting video brightness, contrast and saturation, and choosing to apply a special video effect and so forth. Follow the procedures below to edit your DVD movie:

A. Install this program and launch it. Import your DVD movie, preview each title/chapter and decide which title/chapter you want to edit. You can also click the Trim icon to trim a title or chapter to capture the exact part you want to edit. If you want to edit the whole movie, you can just check all the titles or chapters.
B. Click the Crop icon to crop your DVD movie and select the video area of your DVD movie you would like to keep. If you want to keep the whole original area, you can just skip this step.
C. Click the Effect icon and adjust your video contrast, brightness and saturation to the best level you prefer. If you want to use a special effect, you can also select a video effect for your movie.
D. Choose an output format. There are many output formats from the output format drop-down menu, and most of them will work. I usually use the MP4 format because I may also use the converted movie on my iPod or PSP.
E. After the above settings, you can just select an output format and click the Converter button to convert the optimized DVD movie onto your computer.

Secondly and lastly, burn the optimized movie back to a DVD disc.

This burning tool I use is iDVD. This program offers a great solution to DVD reauthorization. Put the optimized movies under \user\Movies, and the iDVD program will index them. Then follow the step below:

A. Create a project. When you create a project, you should choose an aspect ratio first, either 16:9 or 4:3. For me, I always choose 4:3 because the aspect ratio of my TV is 4:3.
B. Choose a template. iDVD has many menu templates for your choice. Click the template you prefer and it will be applied.

C. Set menu background. Click the Media tab on the lower right part of the interface to switch to the Media window. Drag and drop a movie or a picture to the Drop Zone of the selected menu template as the menu background. If you don't want a background picture or video on your menu, you can skip this step.
D. Add movies. Click the Add button on the lower left of the interface, select Add Movie, and drag and drop the movies from the lower right pane onto your DVD menu one by one. Each time after you drop a movie, you will see a text box where you can rename the movie. You can also choose to add submenus and add movies to each submenu. If you click the Structure  button, you can view the structure of your DVD project and find how many movies you have added.

E. After you finished adding movies to your DVD project, you can click the Play button  to preview your DVD project and see what it will be like on your TV. If the preview is satisfactory, you can just click the File menu on the top of your screen, and select "Burn DVD" to start burning your DVD movie!

After the above two steps, you will get a highly optimized DVD movie out of the original DVD movies.