Director's Commentary? How to

trentsteel

I was wondering if anyone out there knows--or can point me to a good guide on--how to make an audio commentary for a movie on a dvd.

To clarify. I don't need help recording, just instructions on how to put it on the disc.

fuelish

I asked my wife, who does this stuff, and she said the easy way is to have a seperate version of the movie with the commentary track. Then the links on the menu page would be "movie" or "movie with commentary"
To do a seperate audio only track that can be turned on and off depends on the editing software.

trentsteel

Thank you very much for your reply! Yeah, two separate movie files we can't do, since we already have to compress the movie down to fit it on dual-layered disc. We noticed a huge drop in picture quality compressing it onto a single layered disc and we wanted to use dual-layer to preserve some image quality. That would be agreat idea if we had the space or a much shorter movie.

Does she know of any editing software capable of doing it the other way? We have Adobe Premier Pro right now.

fuelish

She uses Premier Pro for editing and Encore for dvd production. But she has never done what you are looking to do. I will ask her about it and she will probably get obsessed and figure it out. I will let you know what happens.

Vrtra Theory

Using Adobe tools, you'd usually export the whole Premiere project into Encore and then create a menu with buttons to switch between audio tracks.

Note that your audio tracks need to be pre-mixed - track #1 might be "regular", and track #2 might be "audio commentary on top of regular audio". You don't really turn tracks on and off, you just switch which track will play over your video.

This page explains how to setup the buttons for your DVD menu in Encore, hope that helps.

trentsteel

Thank you guys so much for the advice. So, Adobe "Tools" and "Encore" then?