This is the eleventh in a series of 12 Tutorials on Sonic DVDitPro HD.
This application is equivalent to Avid DVD.
As the series I am uploading here is a "repackage" of a series I made for Sonic BD Powerstation users, there may be mentions of other Sonic applications.
However the content is just as applicable to AvidDVD as to Sonic DVDitProHD.

In this Tutorial I take a look at adding chapter points on the fly, changing the colour of menues and adjusting menu button highlights.

Hope you find some new useful information that can help you with AvidDVD.

Regards,
Douglas

Douglas,

I enjoy all your tutorials.  They are interesting and informative...

Question:  In many of your DVDit tutorials, you recommend frequent defragging of the hard drive.   However, elsewhere on the site, Avid recommends that we do NOT defrag the drive containing the media files.   My computer has a relatively small program drive (C:) with MC, and two large media drives.   I don't want to use the "C" drive for writing DVD authoring files.   Do you recommend getting another drive just for DVD files, or has Avid changed it's policy regarding defragging?

Terry Snyder:

I enjoy all your tutorials.  They are interesting and informative...

Thank you Terry, I watch them myself quite a lot.

I never have my AvidDVD files going to my Avid Media drive.
There are 2 main reasons.

The first is, as you noticed yourself, that Avid do not recommend defragging the Avid Media drive.
Right now there is some confusion as to whether the recommendation by Avid is an outdated piece of thinking. There are now some who think that due to developments in harddrive management - the defragging might not be a problem anymore. However many still believe that Avid write its files in a special way and that defragging would spoil that system.
I do not take any chances - so I follow Avid's recommendations.

The second reason why I do not use Avid Media drive for any writing of AvidDVD files is because I use QT reference files out of Avid.
The media for the reference files are on my Avid Media drive.
Reading those files and writing back to the same drive as AvidDVD cruches through the encoding is tempting fate....... in my eyes.

Definitely look into adding another drive to your system.
Preferably an internal drive rather than a USB drive.
You do not need to use it exclusively for the AvidDVD work. You can find other uses for it too.
Also remember that there are 2 different places where AvidDVD will want to be writing to.
There are the Temp files and then there are the final authored and output files.
You can specify different directories for them.

Hope this clears things up a bit.

REgards,
Douglas

Thanks for the clarification, Douglas.  With harddrives getting cheaper by the day, I think I'll just add another drive for DVD files.