DVD LAB – or – REELDVD sonic???

[David Roth weiss]

[Frank] “You can’t really burn the DVD’s you’ve authored within DVDlab- you have to burn it elsewhere.”

Not such a bad thing. Authoring programs can’t stay up to date with new burners as easily as devoted burning software.

[Frank] “It also seems to have more problems using ordinary mpg2’s”

Can you define “ordinary” in this case? Reel rejects most files other than 720 x 480 elementary stream (seperate audio) MPEG2 files, and is fairly choosy. DVDLab is actually more tolerent, allowing import of more files types. If your MPEG2 encodes are 720 x 480 DVDLab should not have to reencode. Make cretain to look under the hood to toggle off any function that might be forcing a reencode.

[Frank] “You aslo can’t really test the project you’ve created within DVDlab.”

Testing is somewhat limited in all DVD authoring packages, because until you actually multiplex they all simply simulate most navigation and commands.

[Bill Stephan]

I use Reel DVD and it is solid but not suited to advanced authoring projects. It does make highly compatible discs.

Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City

[Frank Weber]

Hi. Thanks for the replies it cleared allot up for me.
When you say advanced- do you mean like a 90 page, multi cross referenced, mountain of a project??
I have fairly simple needs: The DVD’s are for Showreels so they just need to look pretty and play well… kind of like a female tennis player.

[David Roth weiss]

I agree with Bill. I really like ReelDVD because it makes DVDs that really seem to work. Like most female tennis players, its got a lot of grunt, and it is quite capable of doing the all of the basics you want to do, and more. Because it has no built-in graphics/text/menu tools, you might want to check out DVD Menu Studio from Media Chance. It can be integrated with ReelDVD (and other authoring programs), and does a lot of the overlay “grunt work” automatically after you create cool looking menus and graphics that would be very difficult, if not impossible, using PhotoShop.

[Frank Weber]

thanks

[George Wing]

AFAIK, DVDLab doesn’t come with an encoder (it can do a quick shrink, but necessarily a re-encode to new mpeg parameters).

[George Wing]

DVD LabPro does come with a burning engine — although they offer a more robust burning engine as an addon at a relatively low cost 🙂

DVD Labpro accepts dvd compliant mpegs — what are the attributes of your source files???

You have the option of burning a “Test” version (it builds the dvd for you — but links to movies only show a blank screen — it’s a good way to test the navigation of your dvd menus).

[Ken Hon]

Frank,

While ReelDVD won’t do really complex projects, the other side of the coin is that it’s simple to use. We only author stuff about once a month, so it’s easy to pick up and use. Also, it writes really well to DLT. At first we mastered to a DVD-R and sent it to the replicators. We were getting about 1% returns. We switched to DLT and have probably sold 4000-5000 DVDs without a return. Don’t expect to make fancy hollywood stuff, but if you need a reliable donkey to get you over the mountains, it’s good.

Aloha,

Ken