Quote: I am burning a wedding DVD and I want it to be the best possible quality...I'm thinking TrueTheatre sound (the theatre option) would be best?

Good question but lacking something.

We'll need more information than that. What version of Power Director do you have? What computer? Answer these questions:
http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/7958.page - All of them as possible.

Are you just wanting to burn a copy of the DVD? Standard definition of high definition. Remember it may be write protected.

Do you want to MAKE a DVD from video files? Standard definition of high definition. Where did you get the files? What format are they? Do you want to edit the video files? How much time do you want to put onto a disc? Where do you want it to be played, etc.

Provide any and all information that is requested (and more). Remember we are not mind readers nor are looking over your shoulder. .
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BoilerPlate: To posters who ask for help -- it is nice to thank the volunteers who try to answer your questions !
Anything I post unless stated with a reference is my personal opinion.

Stevek, unless I miss my guess, our friend, "heismystrength" is intending to produce a video of his/her own wedding, recently shot. And I'm guessing the camera may well have been SD card-based. So, let's also assume our friend has one of the more recent Power Director versions, say, PD10 or PD11. Actually it matters not which of the PD programmes are in use, the main suggestion I would make is to burn the disc in SP and avoid problems of freezing when playing on domestic DVD players. It has been my experience with any video I make, if it's in HQ, a) I lose disc capacity[from 2 hours and 20 minutes down to an hour and 10, a 50% drop], and b) the video stutters and freezes at various spots through the playing on domestic players. It seems domestic DVD players can't handle HQ discs when they're home-burned! By setting your produce and disc authoring(burning) parameters to DVD SP, you avoid a lot of those problems but retain a clear and sharp image on screen anyway! As for the audio, that setting is available in the producing stage. After you've set the video's rendering parameters(producing), tick the box for Dolby 5.1 sound. It may not be immediately evident on a home DVD player, played through a normal stereo TV set, but there may be some improvement in the audio.

Neil, I disagree with many of your conclusions and generalizations -- any your guesses concerning the resources.

Your domestic may not be my domestic player. I do not have ANY issues burning high definition - including AVCHD and blu ray. Of course any other DVD is standard definition (720 by 480 or your local resolution). What changes is the bit rate of the video. For best resolution on a standard DVD player (domestic - yours or mine) you would want the highest bit rate so your limit would be about 1 hour or so. Any more would cause degradation of the quality and may introduce artifacts.

How many DVD players have you tried? Are they all with your region code?

Are you burning to top quality discs like Taiyo Yuden-JVC? Use of inexpensive discs are often the cause of the issues you describe.

You also didn't mention anything about hardware or software encoding. That is also important to the quality.

I don't think it matters for this poster since he hasn't provided any information since he originally posted. .
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BoilerPlate: To posters who ask for help -- it is nice to thank the volunteers who try to answer your questions !
Anything I post unless stated with a reference is my personal opinion.

OOPs, I forgot to talk about the effect of hardware to encode the video and burn the disc at the same time.

For best results and rule of thumb, you should be using the make folder set rather than burning directly to disc. If you burn direct to disc, your computer, no matter how good it is, must switch between the two process - encoding and burning. That also brings in the quality of the burner to keep up (buffer).

If you simply make the folder set, then the computer can concentrate on one task - encoding. The there are many ways to burn the folder set but the important item is that it is only doing one thing.

I'm sorry to differ with you on your conclusions, they simply are not supported by my more than 10 years of experience using 5 different video editing programs. .
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BoilerPlate: To posters who ask for help -- it is nice to thank the volunteers who try to answer your questions !
Anything I post unless stated with a reference is my personal opinion.

Stevek
Fair enough, We'll simply agree to disagree. Though I may try your folder idea at some stage, to see how it works. But burning a DVD at HQ, does consume disc space, I'm one who likes to pack a lot into my videos! Sometimes they may be on one subject(like the annual Steamfest, held every April at Maitland, NSW, on the second weekend of that month. It's a weekend when all the steam locomotive enthusiasts descend on that city, video and stills cameras in hand, some hand-held, some on tripods. I just finished editing an hour's worth of video from my own camera and that of a friend for a combined video, the result of which I've extremely pleased with. I recorded the narration in a separate audio recording software and imported the narration as an MP3 track. With each comment I left a bit of a gap( a few seconds) between each comment so I'd have a point to snip, then cut, move along to the next point where the commentary is needed, paste and cut at the end of that comment, repeating the process until the last bit of commentary is in place. The resulting video ran for a smidgin over an hour, so I'll save it and put it with another video(of the same subject, or something else entirely, of at least an hour's duration). And it's this desire to pack a good 2 hour's worth of content into a disc, is the reason I ALWAYS burn at DVD SP. And because I'm shooting with a digital camera, I'm getting sharp, clean images and it's really hard to distinguish between SP or HQ. It's all "much of a muchness", really. As for the DVD player, it's built-in to the base of my flat-screen TV. It will happily play all commercially-made DVDs, including dual-layer, but WON'T touch a home-burn dual-layer, no matter where it was made or who made it. As for region codes, we're in Region 4 in Australia, but that does not apply to home-burn DVDs which are NOT region-encoded. The only reason for the Region-encoding is for the "big boys" like Warner, Universal, Paramount, Village-Roadshow(Aussie) and the likes to control their markets more closely. They're not the least bit interested in the movies themselves, they're just interested in counting the moolah as it pours into their coffers!
P.S. Hardware and Software encoding are a bit above my league - I'm self-taught and have picked up quite a few editing skills, but the inner "guts" of a computer are something I eave to those more knowledgable than myself. As for discs, I always use DVD+R from mainly Verbatim or TDK, companies with solid reputations in this field of recording media.(had to edit again - noticed a missing letter which is now in place( "my" should've been "may" - Keyboard Gremlins, you see! Ha-Ha!)

Neil, Remember that the question was what was the highest caliber (best quality). I'm sure you agree that the higher the bit rate, the better the quality.

You may be settling for good enough! .
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BoilerPlate: To posters who ask for help -- it is nice to thank the volunteers who try to answer your questions !
Anything I post unless stated with a reference is my personal opinion.

Hi, Stevek,
The highest calibre may well mean best quality image but it's achieved at the expense of disc capacity. I may well be settling for "good enough", but that "good enough" is really quite good! As I said, I like to pack a lot into my DVDs, just like I do with my home-burned music CDs. Why waste capacity? If burning a DVD at SP quality allows me over 2 hours of content, I'll happily take that over HQ any day of the week! Like I explained in my last post, I may just have one item of over two hours' duration, or I may have several items with a combined duration of over two hours, but it makes for a good two hours plus, of viewing! Remember, we're shooting digitally here! the image quality is stunningly clear and sharp, even at DVD SP, so I'm not losing much in image quality, but I'm gaining in how much content I can put on my discs!

Cheers!