DVD Production for Planetariums

DVD Production for Planetariums
An introduction by Jim Craig, Planetarium Department Head
James H. Lynn Planetarium, Gastonia, NC

Producing Content

There are many peculiarities to producing content for DVDs. For example, most graphics programs won't output video in the MPEG-2 format used by DVDs. Instead, you can produce AVI files with varying degrees of compression. Here are some things to note when producing DVD video.

Make sure your software can output 720 x 486 files with a 4:3 pixel aspect ratio

Uncompressed AVI files are limited to a 2 gigabyte file size (about 60 seconds)

MPEG-2 is a proprietary compression format so there's no freeware version of it

In the last case, the software you get with your burner will probably include the compression.

I've used a few different packages for producing video content. Here are the two I use most.

POV-Ray
This is a freeware raytracing program available for most platforms. It is not a 3D modeling program but, instead, a 3D programming language. I've been using it since it was QRT (Quick Ray Trace) back on my old Atari 1040STE. It's really good for planets because you simply have to define a sphere, a camera and a light source.
There are lots of resources out there for POV and you can't beat the price. You can find more about it at http://www.povray.org.

3D Studio Max
If you've got a big budget for buying software, this is a great package and used by many professionals to produce CGI for movies. It has a fairly intuitive interface, great tutorials and lots of support among its users. But it's not cheap.

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