CD-Riffic!
Jim Munroe

Doing a video zine on CD has a few advantages to doing one on VHS tape — it's quicker to burn a CD (about 10 minutes on an 8x), it's cheaper to make (maybe fifty cents per blank CD-R), and it's cheaper to mail (the price of a letter). The disadvantages are that VCRs are still more common than fast computers & if you don't have a newish computer, they're pricey. That said, if you want to toy around with the format, here's how I go about making my zine, Novel Amusements.

1. First, I get all the material together. Usually it's in different formats — VHS tapes, DV tapes, CDs. It's hard enough to get people to send in vids, forget trying to get them to submit them in the proper format. I have access to a DV camera, so I transfer the analog to a DV tape via the red/white/yellow RCA cable and then firewire it to my harddrive.

2. When it's on the computer, I convert them all to the same format using Premier or MediaStudio Pro. (I've used different formats in the past but it wasn't compatible with a lot of computers, to I stick to MPEG, 15 frames per second, 320x240 frame size.) This format takes up about ten megs on the CD per minute, which means a 700meg disc can hold about an hour of video.

3. I like to make the discs compatible with Mac, PC, and Linux and pretty easy to use, so I make a simple interface that all systems are used to dealing with: HTML. I build a web page with single frames of the video (Premier has a Save Frame function) that are directly linked with the .mpg files, so you just click through to watch the video. Follow the KISS rule here — every time I've tried to put window dressing on the interface (ie. sound effects) it's fouled up when I've tested it on other machines. When I was done with #2, it looked like this. Feel free to use/abuse the HTML code for #1 and #2, or load it into an app like Dreamweaver to customize it for your zine. Just send me a copy! (Violating the aforementioned "keep it simple, stupid" rule for #3, I decided to embed the vids in a html page instead of linking directly to the .mpeg files. I used this javascript that makes it run on Quicktime with Macs and Windows Media Player on PCs. [Note: this script works well on a CD platform, but not so well online for some reason.] WMP was preferable when available because it goes fullscreen easily, but QT is so much more common and reliable on Macs.)

4. Once I have a working interface on a folder on my local computer, it's time to burn it onto a disc. Since I want it to be cross-compatible, I got a program called CDEverywhere to create an ISO image of the files I want on the disc. CDEverywhere also lets you choose stuff like Autorunning a file on Mac or PC, so it automatically opens up when you put it in the drive. Then I get Nero (a CD burning software package) to Burn Image. I burn a few copies and see how they work on different computers, and adjust accordingly. Testing is more of a big deal if you're pressing a whole bunch at once, since if you're burning them one by one you can refine it. (One of the things I tried to do with the last two was make it playable on a DVD player — you can get Nero to translate MPEG files to a file format (VCD) that will allow most newer DVD players to run it. One way I could see to do it was to duplicate the files and name them specially for DVD, and that would have drastically cut down the number of vids I could put on. I've also gotten PCs to read the .DAT files that VCD requires the videos to be in, but couldn't get Macs to do it. Getting a disc to run on PC/Mac/Linux/DVD has become a bit of a holy grail for me, so let me know if you have any ideas!

5. With the first one, I burned about 300 of them over a few months, just making more as I needed them — usually letting them burn in the background while I did e-mail or whatever. I bought them 100 at a time, blank, for 30 bucks, and then made stickers for them. I slipped them into paper bags and sold them at zine fairs and whatnot for $3. With the second one, I wanted to press a bunch at once, so I called a few places for quotes on pressing a CD (a different process from burning, technically, but with the same end product). In the end, I got a CD duplication place to do 2000 discs (with 2-colour on it) inserted in full-colour cardboard sleeves (more expensive then jewel cases, but so much cooler) for around $2000. I wanted something that would be less labour-intensive and more polished, so I was happy with that, but for a first timer burning is a cheaper and safer option.

Jim Munroe runs this site and does a CD-ROM zine called Novel Amusements.