Very often people will ask questions on various forums seeking help with a situation as to "Why my DVD looks like C#%$?", "My DVD looks poor", "My DVD will not play.", "My DVD will not build", "The Compiler Crashes" (FWIW, I mean for what it\'s worth - as you will see - will also post some answers to these shortly :) )

And often they will get the same answer, more information is required.

Why? Because a request for help that consists of "My DVD will not play?" with no other information provides no details or clues to anyone trying to answer. It can be a range of things that are being asked - from

(a) it will not play in Simulator,

(b) it will not play when built,

(c) it will not play on the DVD Player.

The same applies for things such as "My DVD looks poor?" How does it look poor? Is it washed out? Is it skipping? Is it blocky?

So the best way to ask a question is to be as precise as possible, try to avoid abbreviations as much as possible, unless they are very common to the board where you are looking for help (Hey I do it and I know what WTF, PITA and SOB means, along with the slew of otherwise common email and IM short cuts), but when seeking help it can get in the way.

Also try to use paragraphs to break down ideas and make things flow for the reader. Again, I am as guilty as anyone in not doing that, but try to keep it in mind.

Examples:

FIRST WAY

" I used Final Cut and tried to make a DVD, it looks bad and it will not play when I make a DVD? I am going to get a PC."

Or this SECOND WAY

" I am using Final Cut Pro 5.04 on a Dual Processor G5 running OS 10.4.7, and have downloaded all the Pro Application updates.

I am editing a NTSC DV Video of a school play, most of the time where it is just people talking, but there are some action sequences.

The total movie length is One Hour Forty Five Minutes In length.

I exported a reference movie from Final Cut using the following settings: I bought the reference movie into DVD SP, and let DVD SP encode the movie with the following settings:

The DVD looks and works fine, and it seems to work well when I open up the Video_TS folder and play it back in the Apple DVD Player, it works well, but when I burn it to a DVD (using K-RAP media at 8x speed) it will not play at all"

Trust me, the second question will work in getting a helpful response with alot less back and forth. Oh yeah, just in case - make sure you encode outside of DVD SP, make the Audio A.Pack/Dolby and buy better media. Will help alot. As the first form of question, please let me know what type of Mac you have and how much you want for it. You can use the money to go buy a PC :) <-- Yeah I know, no things like this. More common questions answers will be posted in a bit.