Sonic Solutions' DVDit! was the first DV-authoring program for small businesses and consumers, and Version 2.0 helps prevent rookie errors. With prices ranging from AU$499 to AU$1,699 and scalable feature sets appropriate for all comers, DVDit! warrants strong consideration for anyone seeking to publish MPEG movies on CD-R or DVD.
Sonic offers three DVDit! versions; we tested the Professional Edition (PE). Versions differ in three key ways: encoding capabilities, the number of menus supported, and output formats.
Sonic has already proven itself adept in the consumer/corporate space, designing an extremely intuitive interface supported with a quick-start guide and sample project that will get novices up and running in minutes. The company throws in several themes -- templates with matching buttons and backgrounds.
The program's interface has three main windows dominated by the menu creation/preview windows on the left. Menu creation is simple and flexible. Any 720-by-480 bitmap can serve as the background image. Or you can drag video files onto the background and move through the video to select the best frame to serve as the button. You can also create chapter points within a longer video file to enable jumping to different segments.
Once on the menu palette, you can resize buttons and add drop shadows that are configurable by colour, intensity, opacity and blur, and you can adjust background colour. But DVDit! creates the highlight effect the viewer sees when scanning through the menu options.
You link menus and media assets by dragging them to the target buttons, with the ability to toggle the view to identify the linked assets. You can also set menu flow though the buttons on each page, defining operation when each asset concludes playing or to create timed menus for kiosk operation or continuous loop playback.
Clicking on a small play arrow launches the player, letting you flip through the various menus and buttons to verify design. After testing your title, you can output to DVD, CD-R, DLT drives or to hard drive using simple menu commands.
In CD-R testing, DVDit! recognised and wrote to our Matsushita CD-RW unit adeptly, and the embedded InterVideo WinDVD player performed well on all test systems and was simple to use. Writing to the Pioneer unit was also a positive experience, as was playback compatibility on both PC DVD and DVD Player.
Polished and complete, DVDit! is suitable for simple to sophisticated projects and presents a very high bar for other products in this class.
Sonic Solutions DVDit! Professional Edition
Distributor: New Magic
Ph: 03 9885 5888; Fax: 03 9886 9111
Price: AU$1,699.
Rating: 5 Star
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