Product Reviews

As you'd expect, Mac OS X compatibility was top of Apple's features list when developing version 1.5 of DVD Studio Pro, its professional DVD authoring solution.

A Mac OS 9-compatible version is also supplied, and this is needed for commercial authoring, as DVD-RAM devices and Pioneer's S201 DVD-R authoring drive are not yet supported under OS X. CSS and Macrovision are also supported.

Version 1.5 comes with Peak DV audio editing software and Corel Photo-Paint 10. The latter is an important addition to the suite, as DVD Studio Pro has no menu design tools of its own and uses ready-made menus with rollover buttons in layered Photoshop or Photo-Paint files. Previously, you had to supply your own image editing software, such as Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

A.Pack and Subtitle Editor haven't changed much, aside from being made OS X compatible. For some, A.Pack, with its ability to encode AC-3 files with Dolby 5.1 surround sound, may be worth the price alone. However, we would also like to see Apple develop a plug-in to allow AC-3 encoding straight from Final Cut Pro's timeline, as this is where each audio channel is likely to be defined.

Caption marvel

Subtitle Editor has a good, tactile interface, allowing captions to be synced to video with frame accuracy, but it still won't work with MPEG video files - users have to create a second copy of their movie in QuickTime format rather than simply working with the MPEG videos they've prepared.

An MPEG encoder is provided as a plug-in for QuickTime Pro, and this is accessible through Final Cut Pro for encoding from the timeline. Elemental streams are made, with separate MPEG video and PCM audio files. Markers applied to video on the timeline in Final Cut Pro can now be read as chapter markers by DVD Studio Pro 1.5, but this is only possible when encoding from Final Cut 3.0.3, which had not been

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released at the time of writing.

MPEG-2 quality seems to have improved since the previous version, but no variable bit-rate options or preprocessing controls are provided. There's no batch encoding support, either.

DVD Studio Pro's authoring toolkit is unparalleled within this price bracket. Movie tracks can carry up to eight video angles, eight audio tracks and 32 subtitle streams. They can also be marked with up to 99 chapters, although this can be a tiresome process as no real-time playback is provided when setting them.

The only workable method, aside from marking them up in advance using Final Cut Pro, is to note timecodes of where markers are to be set, and type them into DVD Studio Pro manually.

The program's interface as a whole can be daunting, being controlled almost entirely with text-based drop-down menus, and lacking a creative feel. Nevertheless, users can make good headway once they understand the program, even if it never becomes entirely comfortable to use.

Projects can also carry slideshow and menu elements. While menus can't be designed in DVD Studio Pro, there's a huge degree of control over button links and actions. Menus worked well on a set-top player, but rollovers didn't activate mouse-over actions using software players.

In addition, Web @ccess features, which launch a browser and open a Web page when played as a DVD-ROM, still fail to work on many systems. @ccess tools have been expanded, however, to launch data applications on the disc if need be.

Project preview tools are much more reliable than with version 1.2, and final builds to the hard drive may also be viewed with Apple's DVD Player before being burned to disc. Version 1.5 provides good support for DLT output for replication to DVD9 (dual layered) discs. DVD Studio Pro still won't burn to DVD-RW, but disc images saved to the hard drive can be burned to RW using Toast.

Fried price

For existing users, £169 seems a lot to pay for some small tweaks and fixes, but it may be worthwhile if you want to use OS X full-time. The full package is still expensive, but no similarly priced DVD authoring software on any platform can match it for features.

Inclusion of photo editing software pushes it higher still on the value-for-money scale. We would like to see a slightly friendlier interface, and better behaviour from discs in software players, but DVD Studio Pro may prove a no-brainer for the serious DVD author.