Advanced
Menu Creation
Sophisticated
motion and audio menu creation lets you adjust brightness,
contrast, hue, alignment and drop shadow controls.
Professional
User Interface
Flexible
UI with dual monitor support lets you easily create DVDs with
up to 8 audio tracks and 32 subtitle tracks.
Advanced
Navigation
Easily
set End-Actions and Alternate End-Actions for Hollywood-like
control over title navigation. Plus, get granular control over button
navigation.
Professional
Output Formats
Output
your project to DLT and all DVD media with high-quality VBR
encoding and add copy protection and region coding to your projects.
Pretty Face
DVDit!
has an attractive look and, as soon as we opened the rather thin
manual, we realized there is not much to learn before getting under way
with your first DVD authoring project. Made for those who have no
experience with DVD authoring and don't want to get frightened by file
flinging jargon, DVDit! also gives you enough flexibility and
complexity to keep you producing inspired DVD titles for some time. The
interface is easy and intuitive, with a Theme palette that lets you
move through lists of backgrounds, buttons, fonts and footage. There
are many stock backgrounds buttons and bangles that come with DVDit!,
but that does not mean you are restricted to using only the files
provided. You can make DVDit! your own by importing all the elements to
create the look you want your DVD to have. The main DVD video format is
MPEG-2, a compression technology that dramatically reduces the amount
of disc space required. You can put over two hours of broadcast-quality
video on a single DVD disc. DVDit! encodes video to MPEG-2 from .avi or
.mov files.
Author, Author
DVD authoring is a lot like the old Steve Martin joke, which goes
something like: "I can tell you how to not pay taxes on a million
dollars. OK, first, get a million dollars." Right. Thanks for the tip.
Until recently small-scale producers could only dream of authoring
DVDs. There is good news for all potential-DVD creators: DVD authoring
is no big deal with a product like DVDit!. In fact, it's fun, easy and
very intuitive. The term "authoring for DVD" gives some technophobes
the heebie-jeebies, but that will be completely dispelled with the
first caress of this software. Basically you are laying out graphic
menus with photo or texture backgrounds adding on-screen buttons and
text which you will link to media files (photos, video, audio, etc.).
The process couldn't be easier.
Just DVDit!
For our test of DVDit! we captured a few segments of instructional
video from Videomaker archives on lighting, camera techniques
and production audio. Using the themes that come with DVDit!, we chose
a background for our opening page, wrote a text title intro "Videomaker
Instructional DVD" and tweaked it to our liking. DVDit! has image tools
to adjust the hue, saturation and brightness and text tools to change
font, color, size and shadow. All the standard title tool fare with an
easy to navigate interface. The title page comes up automatically when
the finished DVD is inserted into a drive. The duration of its
appearance is user definable. The next page is the main menu. After
choosing a background, you place buttons from the button palette and/or
text, which you link to your media files, or other menus. In this case
we sized small buttons with sub-titles of "Lighting," etc. and linked
both the button and title to our footage by dragging and dropping the
clip from the media menu onto the button and text. Poof, they're
linked! Now when you mouse over the text or button it highlights and is
armed for clicking. You can, at any point, play back the results of
your progress so you can check links, move menu items, etc. Nothing is
written in stone, so even as you move on to other menus and levels of
your presentation you can return to fine tune.
Ready to Burn
With
our test project finished to our liking, the final step was to create a
DVD Volume, which is a directory of all media files and navigation
information. If files are not already in MPEG-2 they will be converted
by DVDit! at this time. Select Make DVD and you'll be prompted to
choose the quality setting and compression type based on bit-rate. For
rates lower than 2 Mbps MPEG-1 will suffice. For anything above 2 Mbps,
you'll use MPEG-2. All that's left is to choose the output device.
Now that you have your DVD project ready, with media files linked in
easy-to-navigate menus, what do you do with it? DVDit! lets you build a
Player Application that you can play off your hard drive or write to
removable media like CD-R using .avi or MPEG-1 files, but when it comes
to burning an actual DVD-Video with MPEG-2 the options are slim. If you
have a project that you are going to mass-produce, then having a master
DVD burned for duplication may make sense. But if you're thinking about
making DVDs to send out to friends you're just going to have to wait
for an affordable DVD-Video recorder like the rest of us. In the
meantime you can compose your projects and get them all cued up for
when you own that DVD recording device.
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