Product Reviews

Keeping copies of the 'makings' for old DVD projects can be a real chore. Once burned, constituent audio and video gets archived, and re-assembling it is far from easy - reversing the magic performed by DVD creation tools such as iDVD and DVD Studio Pro is a long and messy business, juggling huge movies while trying to avoid re-encoding and ruining quality.

Miraizon's Cinematize 2 Pro aims to save you the hassle, so that you can extract almost anything you want from a DVD, and re-assemble clips into edited highlights. It works with unencrypted DVDs straight from disk, and decrypted DVDs that have been ripped to disk; it cannot perform decryption or ripping itself. Although it copes with original DVD disks quite briskly, if the .VOB files are large, you should move them to your hard disk to get best performance.

Its workflow is clear and logical: using a single window, you first choose which file set you want to extract from, different file sets representing the structural elements of the DVD. You are then moved to the Segment pane, where you can switch between available chapters, then visually select the start and end point of each clip that you want to extract. This pane has a small cosmetic blemish when run at low screen resolutions (800 x 600 or less),

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in that some controls become superimposed. Although slightly confusing, it does not impede use.

Video, Audio and Output tabs offer a wide choice of different encodings and other options, but default to QuickTime. When all is set, a single click on the Extract button drives Cinematize 2 Pro to whistle through the business, delivering a complete movie for each of the defined extracts.

Although the Apple Store offers you the regular version of Cinematize, we would advise buying online and stumping up the extra few bucks for the Pro, as it gives you access to the whole content, including animated menus, subtitling of your choice, multi-channel audio, custom QuickTime settings, and batch extraction with pre-sets. This ensures that your refactored DVDs can keep subtitles, otherwise so readily lost. The Pro version also supports automatic generation of chapter markers, which can be a great time-saver. The application is delivered as a Universal Binary with hardware acceleration from G4, G5 and Intel processors, and exemplary documentation.

One interesting issue that you will encounter is really a quirk in QuickTime. Cinematize offers several different modes for synchronisation between audio and video, including the easy option to correct both offset and trim. When you do, you will notice that extracted movies are one frame longer in video at each end. This is to work around QuickTime's tendency to add a blank white frame if the audio and video start and end completely synchronously. It is typical of Miraizon's attention to fine detail that this issue is corrected automatically, although you are given other synchronisation options if you wish to handle it yourself.

Like all the best products, Cinematize takes a messy and technical task and gives it a simple, efficient workflow. Everyone who wants to extract from DVD should use it.