Product Reviews

The latest version of Apple's consumer DVD authoring package has had less of an overhaul than iPhoto and GarageBand, but still benefits from some new themes and a few features that will make your DVDs look even more professional.

The headline feature is what Apple calls animated drop zones. In previous versions, menu items could be illustrated by photographs or movie clips, but the zone for dropping photos or clips remained static on-screen. Now these drop zones can move around the screen and the border of the zone can be animated. This doesn't sound like a big deal and has the potential to create headache-inducing menus when used over-enthusiastically. But when you see it in use, the overall effect can be stunning - particularly when used with sound effects. It's now possible to create menus that look as if they came straight from a Hollywood studio.

Speaking of themes, there are 15 new ones in iDVD 5, ranging from the slick, professional templates that wouldn't look out of place on a professionally made wedding DVD, to the bright and funky Anime Pop. In between, there are the obligatory baby themes and a couple designed for showing off portfolios of work. There's a good mix in terms of style and content - some would work well for one or two longer movies, others for photo slideshows, and one or two for collections of short movie clips.

OneStep DVD is iDVD's equivalent of Magic iMovie. Plug in a DVD camcorder and select OneStep DVD from iDVDs start-up menu. The application takes the footage from the camcorder tape and turns it into a DVD movie that plays automatically when

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the disc is inserted into a DVD player. It's a good way of quickly putting footage onto DVD, although you obviously don't have the opportunity to edit it or create menus.

iDVD 5 includes support for DVD+R and DVD+RW as well as DVD-R and DVD-RW. This means that anyone with a recent Mac (roughly speaking, anything that shipped within the past 18 months) can choose which media they want to use. However, iDVD still doesn't support external DVD burners. The abilty to burn an iDVD project as a disc image is a compromise, as it allows you to burn the image from Toast to an external device. However, iDVD 5 won't install on a Mac that doesn't have a Superdrive, so its not a solution for anyone with a combo drive and an external DVD writer.

The DVD Map, introduced in iDVD 4, has been improved. You can now perform some editing functions from within the Map view. And some edits can be performed in batches across a number of map elements. Transitions, themes and menu and button settings can all be edited in this way, and you can add clips, photos or music to a project by dragging them onto the Map view.

In use, iDVD 5 is as simple and straightforward as it ever was. There's been no improvement in the time it takes to encode movies to Mpeg 2, nor in the efficiency of the encoder. And, disappointingly, there's still no support for movie files that have already been encoded.

There are some neat new features in iDVD 5, and existing users will be pleased to be able to create even better and more professional-looking DVDs. New users will also be delighted with what they can achieve with very little learning time. However, there are some notable omissions. Apple may argue that support for external DVD burners is a 'professional' feature, but it's wrong. External DVD drives are now as ubiquitous as CD writers, and dual-layer DVD writers are becoming commonplace. Users of iDVD won't be able to take advantage of the faster writing times and higher capacity of these drives directly. Why should someone who spends £150 on a dual-layer writer have to spend £250 on DVD Studio Pro to be able to author DVDs on it?

iDVD 5 is a useful improvement, but could have been much better.