[Richard Bartlett]

I did buy Dragon’s Lair in the DVD-Video format. It was fairly dodgy for how well the interactivity worked with some DVD players. Early Samsung (pre DVD-Forum signing) and Toshiba players were a no-no due to waiting for some menu state to occur before accepting input from the controller.

That aside, I think DVD Architect would be labour intensive for writing a video game upon. Once done though, the workflow you’d have could be re-used with a similar game.

I’d tend towards using DVDLabPro for your task. Much more in the way of tunable elements and debug tools in there. I don’t think ReelDVD would be up to this task. DVDJr might have been in its day. Otherwise, full Scenarist or Maestro or a Mac authoring tool.

Dragon’s Lair at least had the benefit of a fairly slack interface based on the laserdisc of the day and also the lower expectations of 1980s video gamers. However I don’t doubt something fantastic could be made on DVDR using a PC based authoring tool.

Watch out for Windows Longhorn or Office2006 (or whatever either are/become) the word is that Microsoft will do for DVD authoring what FrontPage did for web content creation. ie Make it a bit painful but multi-faceted and quite thoroughly implemented. Thus these facets should permit a programming strategy to your work.

If you can get hold of ReelDVD, DWS2 and DVDA3 demo versions, I’d consider you try each before purchasing. Test your workflow for your specific need. The user operation control seems to be there in DVDA3, just that I wouldn’t like to be the one that encourages you wholeheartedly down that route. I would say that the flipping between the authoring environment and the testing environment, whilst functional would be somewhat unsatisfying with a menu or clip that needed significant branch testing.

It is unfortunate that the XML interface to themes doesn’t cover all elements of scripting otherwise you’d be able to use that as your development environment. Unless I’ve misread what DVDA3 brings…. ?

I’d be prepared to do quiz questions using DVDA, but I wouldn’t want to pilot in 3D through an asteroid belt using my remote control on my DVD-Video player! 😉

[Richard Bartlett]

“mouse-over” animated buttons are also possible I think with DVDA3. Perhaps you have to think more out of the box to do what the full suite of a Scenarist can do. It can be quite arduous having to repeat the same menu with each and every possible navigation position and press-play action. However if you make it into your own template, the skeleton is probably something you can adjust when you want it again.

As I learnt from Oscar with his DVDLab product. You can do some fancy things if you just think outside the limits of the basic building blocks. Thus animation and kiosk like or even Flash! like user control environments can be created in DVDA3. A film strip that is animated and jogs along as you go left and right through the chapter points. The highlight that shows where you are can even be enhanced beyond the limitation of the DVD-Video format. You can even put a combination lock on the front end of the video for your viewer to have to enter the correct series of digits on to play the video that is for them to see or not to see.

DVD authoring and how creative it can be reminds me of the (8bit 1980s)home computers of yesteryear. Or perhaps how a web page can look amateur or professional depending on who is behind the controls.

It is nice to expect Sony to make things easier for us at each revision of Architect. However it is also nice to have a DVD looking like no other. I feel more empowered using Architect than I have done with any other tool that I’ve bought or tested for DVD creation. YMMV

[Richard Bartlett]

ProHD to HDV is a like comparing WindowsXP to Windows2000. They are members of the same high compression MPEG-2 family that has the bit budget to fit onto a miniDV tape at the same speed as SD DV (SP). If you are buying new you’d probably get the ProHD.

The main differences are the length of the GOP as I understand. 6 elements in ProHD instead of 15.
However the glass and the low compression outputs of the JVC (and the forthcoming Panasonics) are the rub that Sony have to market against.
JVC doesn’t have a high end market to protect…..

[Richard Bartlett]

Vegas4 supported MPEG-2 (not the DVD setting) upto 15Mbps in both program stream and transport stream formats with a 2000×2000 resolution project within the NLE but could upsample higher (circa 8000×8000) on rendering. It did support 80Mbps (?) but in a later patch this was removed, possibly due to the marketing department but it may have been a problematic above 15Mbps. I recall folks enjoying 40Mbps and 80Mbps for pro work.

Now DVCPro HD infers 100Mbps to me…. so in either case Vegas4 doesn’t. Vegas5 probably doesn’t either. However Vegas6 might.

However you may choose to run a lower bitrate proxy file in Vegas and then use an uncompressed HD frame serving app (like TMPGEnc+VFAPI) to deliver into Vegas when you are ready to do your final print. I haven’t tried this myself but this was a valid workflow for SD using MP@ML files.

I’d personally like to use Vegas for both print and video use. Pure speculation, but Vegas6 hopefully adds to the bits per pixel resolution (RGB or YUV), however I doubt that if it doesn’t already it won’t by the time it launches as the 3rd party plug-in dependencies of such an upgrade are apparently quite painful to overcome.