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Apple DVD Studio Pro 2

May 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By S. D. Katz

Web-Expanded Version

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DVD Studio Pro 3

Until last year, DVD players were still a luxury item in most computers. DVD authoring software was expensive and difficult to use, particularly for people whose main interest was using DVDs for reels and other promotional material.

Apple's iDVD helped popularize the format for home movie style presentations, but it didn't have enough features for media professionals. DVD Studio Pro was supposed to be the product that delivered professional authoring to a wider audience; unfortunately it was a bear to use.

Version 2 of DVD Studio Pro shows Apple's trademark ease-of-use design. It's clear that the development team thought long and hard about how to make DVD authoring accessible to general and expert audiences — not an easy goal to achieve. The feature list is impressive: support for multiple languages, a new variable-bit MP2 compressor that allows batching, Dolby audio encoding, copyright protection, and a multi-tiered interface. On top of all this, the price has been cut in half.

Apple does two things that make this product easy to use: First, there are graphic templates for several basic DVD designs, including Menus and dozens of Buttons and Shapes. Secondly, there are three user interfaces: Basic, Extended, and Advanced. You can toggle between these at any stage in a project, which is helpful for reducing screen clutter. But that's just a side benefit; the main advantage of the different levels is to help users learn the software easily. This is done by emphasizing workflow in the interface. The software leads users through the process of making a DVD by only showing pertinent information at any decision point. Using DVD Studio Pro 2 is like answering a multiple choice exam and having a crib sheet handy.

The Basic Interface presents two main work areas, the Menu screen in the center and a vertical Palette on the left. The Menu area is your blank canvas and the Palette stores pre-made Templates, Styles, and Shapes in tabbed menus. The Palette also holds imported video, audio, and still images specific to your project. There are sub tabs for Buttons, Text, Drop Zones, and Layouts.

Any template can be customized, including the shape, placement, color, and font used for buttons. In the previous version of DVD Studio Pro, buttons and other menu elements had to be created in Photoshop and imported. Now you can create these elements without leaving Studio Pro, although you can still make custom designs in Photoshop. Contextual Alignment guides appear whenever you drag an element in the Menu window, for example, buttons or drop zones.

Menu elements from the palette can be added via keystrokes or by drag and drop. Either technique invokes contextual drop-down palettes that can be selected by dropping a dragged item on the appropriate menu item. This intelligent drag-and-drop approach greatly reduces the learning time required to understand the authoring process by combining training and design in one step.

Here's the creation process in Basic mode: First, select a menu template and drag this to the Menu window. Second, change the style and text of the existing buttons to suit your project. The buttons are already wired to the correct behavior, but this can be customized by bringing up the Inspector Palette. Check the behavior of the Menu in the simulator. Burn the disk. This is essentially an adult version of iDVD, and it's very easy to use. If this is all you need, you can produce stylish customized presentations for reels and portfolios without ever leaving the Basic interface.

The Slide Show palette in Basic mode is an all-in-one sequencing tool and is so simple to use that you barely need to consult a manual. Still images are imported and appear in a list. Changing the order of slides is as simple as dragging a slide to a new location in the list. Each slide is assigned a duration that is easily edited. A Pause button determines whether the DVD advances automatically from slide to slide or is advanced by the user.

Music can be imported as an .aif file and dropped on a button that automatically syncs the music to the slides. You have two choices: time the slide show duration to the length of the music clip, or time the music to the slide show length.

The entire process of setting up a slide show, testing the timing, and reordering the slides to try other versions of the sequence takes a few minutes.

Connections in Basic

The button and Menu behavior in Basic Mode is determined by predefined Templates and contextual menus. In other words, the scripting is hidden from the user because you are using predefined, though flexible, relationships. This is as much control as is needed by many artists who look at DVDs as a delivery medium for their work — essentially a means to an end. DVD Studio Pro 2 is also a full-featured authoring environment for studios that need to create DVDs with lots of chapters, extra features, and complex relationships. You begin to find these features as soon as you move to Intermediate Mode.

Intermediate and Advanced Modes

The Intermediate mode adds a Timeline and several other palettes that expand the main Palette. It's a fairly big jump from the hand-holding you find in Basic, but is only an expansion of the Basic layout and workflow. There is no new functionality, just more control of existing tools and features. The Timeline is borrowed from Final Cut Pro, which is where you will be adding Markers to your video. Markers are signposts that tell the DVD where to start and finish segments of a video clip. As you might expect, Apple encourages you to use Final Cut Pro. Adding markers in FCP is easy, and they remain editable in DVD Studio Pro. You can also add and edit your Markers entirely from within Studio Pro.

DVD Studio Pro's Timeline allows for nine video angles, eight audio tracks, and 32 subtitles. The titling is very flexible, with control over font, color, and style. Subtitles in .son, .stl, .txt, and .scr can be formatted or you can create them from scratch from within Studio Pro.

In addition to the Timeline, a palette called the Inspector is part of Intermediate Mode. Its content changes depending on what element or palette is selected in the Outline. Outline contains all the elements of a project in a list view. The Inspector provides control of the parameters for each part of a project (these are not available in Basic mode). Again, if you were working in Basic mode and wanted more control over any element, you could enter Intermediate mode and find any parameter associated with an asset.

The actual connections between elements is found in — you guessed it — the Connections palette. Here Source and Target lists show relationships between elements so you can track down any strange behavior easily. In a complex project I imagine this gets a bit complicated, but short of a node-based view (which has been added in version 3), this is a straightforward representation of how your project is wired.

The Advanced interface is where you will do things like add multiple video angles, add links to the Web, add buttons that function over a video track, and scripting. That last word strikes fear in the hearts of many who imagine having to write command line code. Once again, DVD Studio Pro 2 has an interface solution that makes scripting highly accessible. Here's an example:

In the Track Inspector you will find scripting for Display Condition. A typical scripting statement is presented as an option in a dropdown menu:

Statement 1 = Statement 2

DVD Studio Pro 2 presents this statement as button menus:

Button Menu 1 - Button Menu 2 - Button Menu 3

Let's say our goal is to add parental control to a DVD based on the MPAA rating. In this situation, a user would not be able to access certain material on the DVD. To script this, you would select “Parental Level” from Button Menu 1. The equals sign between statements would be set to “equal to” or “less than.” Button Menu 2 would be set to “3 — PG.” The Alternate Target could be a Slide Show. This means that if a movie clip with a PG or lower rating is selected, a clip can be played. However if an R clip is selected, then the Alternative Target is selected, in this case the slide show.

So scripting in DVD Studio Pro 2 is not command line or in some language that you have to learn. Like every other part of the program, intelligent options are provided in an appropriate context.

Most scripting happens within Inspector, and while the interface may vary from the example above, drop-down Button Menus replace command line typing.

Conclusion

DVD Studio Pro 2 is the single best software effort that Apple has made to date. Final Cut Pro achieved excellence over the course of four consecutive releases. DVD Studio Pro has done that in half the time.

There are a few things that could be better. The tutorial material is rudimentary and fails to make some basic operations clear. Online Help is good at explaining what tools do, but not how they are used. Apple needs to show techniques, not just technology.

Even with the highly intuitive interface and extremely smart workflow, Intermediate and Advanced features are far from simple if you are authoring DVDs for the first time. It would also be helpful to have example Button and Menu elements available in .psd format with explanatory text indicating how Photoshop is used to make Menu elements.

Apart from the fairly uninspired documentation, DVD Studio Pro 2 is a great product and an excellent companion to FCP. Filmmakers who thought they were only interested in a basic delivery medium may find themselves exploring interactive design as an end in itself.

Finally there is a format that allows inexpensive distribution of a filmmaker's work replacing the much-reviled U-Matic cassette. After years of cringing as 35mm shot footage became unrecognizable when filtered through the electronics of a 30-year-old technology, a very affordable replacement is available. Hopefully the only U-Matic decks we will have to look at will be on Ebay.

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DVD Studio Pro 3

DVD Studio Pro 3 is an able follow-up to the complete rewrite of the program that debuted as DVD Studio Pro 2 less than a year ago.

Apple received high praise in the industry for making DVD authoring more accessible for even the most demanding multi-chapter projects. Apple’s innovative context-sensitive drop palettes available in basic, intermediate, and advanced interface options are opening interactive DVD design to a wide range of new users as DVD becomes the delivery medium of choice in the entertainment industry.

Version 3 is a generous release with many enhancements and new features. Most of the new features add capabilities, but there are also improvements to basic workflow. For example, Graphical View is a boon to users accustomed to building complex projects. The list of new features includes render-free transitions, Alpha Transitions, Graphical View, DTS Audio, Photoshop Integration, an improved Compressor, support for more output formats and import of iDVD 4 projects.

Graphical View

DVD is not a linear medium, so lists and charts are not the best way to show the relationships you create when you author a DVD. Apple has added drag-and-drop contextual menus, including ways to create relationships between button, menus, images, slide shows, and chapters. This way you can create a DVD without having to know much about what happens under the hood. However, this only works up to a point, and for a project of even marginal complexity, the user needs to see its structure.

Interactive Graphical View provides that with a node-based interface. Graphical View shows all the elements of a project, including tracks, menus, slide shows, scripts, and stories. Relationships can be easily defined and edited within the click edit interface. One useful feature is the ability to view only selected connections or the entire project. This is a real gift for multi-chapter projects with lots of assets. You can also print out the Graphical View to send to a client.

Transitions

DVD Studio Pro 2 made ample use of pre-designed elements such as menus, buttons, and entire screens. These templates were useful for novice users to quickly create DVDs, and because the templates are editable, users could easily customize them. Used as a guide, templates are also an excellent teaching tool.

In Studio Pro 3, Apple has expanded this prefab asset approach to include transitions. Alpha transitions are available in 30 customizable styles listed in a dropdown menu. The alpha channel controls the transparency according to unique designs, and is comprised of three elements stored in folders located in a specific place in the OS X directory. Designs are typical corporate video stunts such as Flip, Cube, Droplet, Melt, Rotation, and other kinetic effects. Transitions can be implemented between buttons, slides in a slide show, and menus. Using DVD Studio’s compositing engine, all transitions can be previewed in real time.

Millimeter readers are more likely to create their own designs, but again, the provided transitions are useful as a learning tool. In this case, you simply create your own folder of original elements in the directory and you’re good to go. Final Cut Pro, Shake, Motion, and After Effects can be used to make the effects used to create an original transition.

Photoshop integration is another way that Studio Pro 3 benefits from other software. Having said this, it should be noted that since Studio Pro 2 it’s been possible to create buttons with considerable flexibility without leaving the program. While this is helpful, DVD design requires assets to be imported, and Photoshop is the logical place to create screens and buttons.

New in Studio Pro 3 is the ability to import a layered PSD file in the Asset Manager and perform a sub launch. This called the Open in Editor feature and it allows you to edit a file in Photoshop and have it update immediately in Studio Pro 3.

Editing Refinements

Copy and paste functionality has now been added to buttons, drop zones, and text objects between menus, which saves trips to the Asset Manager. Copy and paste also works with formatted text and buttons that can be moved from one subtitle clip to another. Since I make quite a few reels and portfolio DVDs, the copy and paste in the slide show is also another time saver in an already efficient interface.

Compressor 1.2

When I first reviewed DVD Studio Pro 2, I had some problems with the compressor and generally did not like having to leave the program to encode. While it’s possible to encode within DVD Studio Pro, Compressor adds the ability to batch multiple files. Now that I have become used to the workflow, using Compressor is second nature.

Version 1.2 adds the ability to directly encode video from HD to MPEG-2 by scaling the video and changing the frame rate when necessary. For instance, when the HD source file is in 24fps. MPEG-1 export is also new, and is important for archiving or sending out approvals of long-form content. This allows twice the amount of program to fit onto a DVD—with the caveat that the picture quality is inferior (MPEG-1 uses 240 lines of information).

New Format Support

A really big advance in DVD Studio Pro 3 is support for DVD-RW, DVD+R, and DVE+RW. In the past, Studio Pro only wrote to the DVD-R specification, which allowed it to be played on any recent DVD player, but not on all computers. RW formats are rewritable, although I’m not sure when I would rewrite an authored disk. I’d be far more likely to do this when storing raw data. Still, Studio Pro 3 now supports all the major formats—at least until the blue laser HD DVDs arrive.

DTS Audio

There are two kinds of sound systems in movie theaters: Dolby and DTS. Both have thunderous and annoying opening logos that appear before feature films. However, once the movies get started you may appreciate the sound quality. In the past, DVD Studio Pro only supported Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. Studio Pro 3 now adds DTS support.

Conclusion

With the addition of Graphical View, improved Photoshop integration, and support for new DVD and audio formats, DVD Studio Pro has few remaining holes to plug in its feature set. It was hard to fault the previous version; the aforementioned new features were minor omissions. These new features are added value in what is already the only reasonable DVD authoring solution for the Mac.

But the software could still be better. Yes, Apple has done an excellent job of making DVD authoring simpler, but it still takes time to learn the interface. I think Apple could supply better tutorials and documentation. This would be easier than getting a new app out the door. Third-party books should begin appearing soon, but simple tutorials are available on the program CD.

Other than that, DVD Studio Pro 3 is an excellent choice for anyone looking to present their portfolio on DVD, production companies interested in offering authoring services, or indie filmmakers wanting to send project trailers to investors.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.