avid to dvd

[Alex Alexzander]

DVD Studio Pro is not available for the PC. So your choices are Encore DVD amoung others. Encore has had a few problems with DLT drives for some users. It has a solid, polished interface, and the menu creation capability is pretty good. It’s well integrated with Photoshop.

I replicated from it, and it does indeed work. It doesn’t have the ability DVD Studio Pro has for making DDP images to hard disc so that you can make real masters without a DLT drive. I raise this issue because if you can’t get your DLT drive to work with it, you’ll be forced to buy Gear Software’s Gear Pro Mastering Edition, whcih can take a VIDEO_TS folder and turn it into DDP images or DLTs.

DVDit 6 Pro is also a great program. Less templates, and it works a lot more in the traditional sense of authoring. It is due any day now for a bug fix package, and once it arrives at that stage, it will be a great alternative. Both of these two have their strengths and their weeknesses however. I could make a strong case for either one.

I think DVD Studio Pro for the Mac is without a doubt the clostest thing there is to a full blown pro quality authoring application. It’s matured over the years, and it really isn’t missing much. You can do a lot more with that, then just about everything, and its a complete package. But, you need a Mac to run it.

If you have to get started today, then I’d say go for Encore. If you can wait a little while for DVDit 6’s bug fix, then that is a good choice as well. It really depends on a couple features. They are awefully close in some ways.

ReelDVD is an option, and I happen to like it, but many find it hard to use, and it authors DVDs in such a way that you don’t get the timecode readout on your DVD player. Some could care less about that, and others really hate that. Everyone agrees that ReelDVD makes perfect DVDs. It is picky about what DLT drives is supports. You actually need one of two specific SCSI cards to get their support on the DLT side. DVDIt Pro 6 has more features, but we are waiting for a fix to arrive. DVDit seams to work quite well with various SCSI controllers, and I never had an issue geting my DLT to work with it.

Start to consider what is important to you.

Alex Alexzander

[Duane Fulk]

We do a lot of DVDs and the best combination we have found is Procorder for compression and Encore for authoring. Quick and simple. We don’t do mass duplication so the DLT problems aren’t important to us, but that might be something to consider if it’s needed for you productions.

Duane