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Integrate Review —
Apple DVD Studio Pro 3

Dec 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Frank McMahon

New Graphical View and bundled AC-3 audio encoder add power to DVD authoring program.

I wish Apple made Windows products. Seriously, DVD Studio Pro 3 is such a sweet suite that it hardly seems fair that Apple users have all the fun. But fun is exactly what you will have in creating DVDs on the Apple platform. This latest version of the DVD authoring program finally nails it when it comes to feature set, handily earning its Pro designation.

Now fun might seem an odd description of using a professional program, but DVD Studio Pro has advanced to the point where creation is fairly effortless. It's more about collecting your content and making it shine than struggling with an interface. DVD authoring programs in particular have a reputation for being slightly hard to grasp at first, but Apple has done much to make this program easy to use, with lots of drag and drops.

One exciting new feature is the Graphical View that, as in some compositing or 3D programs, shows you a schematic grid of linked thumbnails. The flow of your project is easily ascertained from viewing the arrowed links that connect all the elements such as menus, video, and slideshows. The Graphical View also shows stories, which are variations of the main project. Stories allow you to branch off and effectively make your project tell a different story. It's a different workflow, but still based on the initial concept — just stored separately. Whereas DVD Studio Pro 2 featured a textual view, this new 3.0 version really gives you a visual overview of your DVD. That's crucial for larger projects with many clips and paths. At any time you can click on an element to bring it up for editing. Also, you can print out the graphic overview and have a very detailed and easy-to-understand project map to review with your clients.

Transitions have been updated to feature realtime performance, meaning you can now drag and drop a transition betweens clips or stills and preview the effect right away. Wipes, rotates, dissolves, blurs, and many more (30 total) can now be added easily without having to create a separate transition track. New alpha transitions use transparency for ultra-silky fades. In fact, the suite of transitions is one of the best I have seen in any DVD program. Professionally produced, and they all look great. Keep in mind that these effects can transition from track to track and menu to menu, not just videos and stills.

Apple has beefed up integration with other programs. You can now choose a graphic element and immediately edit it in Photoshop. As for Apple's own programs, Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack, and Motion are all tightly tied in for easier external adjustment of your elements. Directly bring in audio tracks from your Soundtrack timeline, import Final Cut chapter markers, incorporate Motion animated menus, and so on. If you are using an external program and you save the item, when you jump back to DVD Studio Pro 3, the program will prompt you to confirm if you want to update the element. This integration really ties Apple's other visual and audio software into DVD Studio Pro for added creative possibilities. As a matter of fact, if you've been weaning on iDVD 4, you can now import those project files into the big daddy here and take them to advanced levels. (You'll also be able to move up to widescreen, which is not supported in iDVD).

Audio support is extensive now in 3.0. With the addition of the bundled A.Pack, you can encode to all professional audio formats such as Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1. (For more on audio, see the sidebar on the following page.)

In addition, the new Compressor 1.2 can encode HD (such as files created with Final Cut Pro HD) and directly downconvert to SD MPEG-2. Compressor 1.2 does an amazing job of creating DVD video, and its VBR encoding with motion estimation ensures you'll get great video at the smallest file size. There are realtime previews for compression, and you can also add in filters before you encode. There are many compression presets, but if you feel daring you can step off the dock and sail with your own settings, with numerous requester pages for tweaking and finessing.

Set the program to transcode your SD and DV files automatically upon importing, so you can continue to work as your video is converted to MPEG-2 in the background. Adjust via the size of the output disc (single- or dual-layer) so everything definitely fits on the target DVD-R. You can export your entire disc project to your hard drive and preview it with the built-in virtual DVD player before committing to disc as well.

Templates abound in the program. In fact, you could put together a professional-looking DVD without ever dipping a design toe in Photoshop. You've got lots of built-in menu templates, 3D buttons, transitions, shapes, and graphics that can easily be added to your project.

One element I love in DVD Studio Pro 3 is the context-sensitive drop palettes. Whenever you drag in a graphic element or video clip or button, right before you drop it you are presented with a palette of options. The power of these palettes cannot be understated: they always present you with the exact options you want at any given time. For example, if you drag in an image, you are presented with options to either use it as a background, or make it a button, or make it a button and add it to a track, or include a chapter index on the item, and so on. In other programs you add elements and then sift through laboriously to make sure they have the right settings in your project design. In DVD Studio Pro 3, the context-sensitive drop palettes take just about all of the guesswork out of the task — while gingerly guiding you to the correct setting. This is an excellent feature used throughout the program.

DVD Studio Pro 3 has really blossomed into a very professional tool. I like that you can create a DVD slideshow in a few clicks, setting a default duration and a default transition for all of the images at once.

Also handy is that you can redesign the user interface exactly as you want it, with resizable windows, tear-off tabs, and the ability to save a preset of your work screen for later recall.

The output options are smart. For example, if you jam-packed a project with too much for one DVD, the software gives you the option to split your content between two different layers and asks where the layer change should occur.

The media browser really keeps all your elements in one palette that you can slide around the screen. All your video, stills, styles, buttons — everything is in one place, which is amazingly useful for larger projects.

Other cool additions are a scripting language to create advanced interactivity for set-top players as well as internet-linked computer playback, quick and easy subtitle creation (up to 32 streams), easy drag-and-drop setup of alternate video angles, and lots more in terms of small tweaks and interface overhauls.

Not much isn't good with this new version. The DVD Studio Pro 3 manual is way too wordy at 600-plus pages for a program that is relatively easy to use. (Thank goodness for the 140-page tutorial guide.) Screen real estate gets into extra acres when all the major palettes are up, so widescreen monitors are recommended.

Overall the program is very refined now, both in feature set and usability. I would be hard pressed to find a better DVD authoring program on the Apple platform. Oh, and did I submit my request for a Windows XP Pro version yet?

I think DVD Studio Pro has turned a corner, going from a DVD authoring program to a visual creation program — not unlike a compositing program in many ways. The layout is like that of a high-end animation program: timeline, schematic project viewer, templates. Not many programs can strike the balance of putting the gears behind the scene so that the palette of creation and expression is in front and easy to use and experiment with. Now with version 3.0 of DVD Studio Pro, Apple has reached that plateau. I am very excited to see where the company takes the program next.

A.Pack: The Bundled Audio Encoder

Back in the early days of desktop DVD authoring (not all that long ago), there was no gray area between programs. They fell into either the high-end, out-of-reach-for-desktop-users zone or the clunky-consumer-cute-interface area. Progress has pushed high-end features down to desktop DVD programs with attractive prices. Apple has added as many features as it can stash into DVD Studio Pro 3. The company continually refines the interface for smooth workflow, and adds options that allow desktop producers to distribute to technologically advanced clients. Many DVD Studio Pro users have been thirsty for an easy way to incorporate Dolby Digital (AC-3) audio files. The new version 3.0 of the program provides exactly that: a way to encode audio files into formats such as 5.1 surround.

Encoding for AC-3 comes via a separate program included with the package, called A.Pack. It is not part of the main interface, but it's no trouble to have it running and encoding as you continue to work in DVD Studio Pro 3. The basic interface of A.Pack is fairly simple. On the left are six boxes for inserting audio tracks for 5.1, and on the right are various tabbed pages for choosing output options. By the way, if you just want to output a two-channel Dolby Digital audio file, you can do that just by changing the audio coding mode to 2/0 (L, R). This causes the the left side of the interface to show only two boxes.

At this point it's probably important to point out what A.Pack doesn't do. It's not a mixing program. In fact, there are no volume or mixing controls at all. It's basically an encoder with no special effects, meaning it can't take a stereo channel and let you add a few filters for a simulated surround effect. In fact, you pretty much need to have all six channels sweetened, mixed, and ready to roll before you even boot up A.Pack.

Load the six channels by clicking on one of the boxes. A requester pops up, allowing you to navigate to an audio file. There is a way to auto-load an entire 5.1 soundscape composed of six separate files, and that is by using file extensions. The left extension is .L and the right, .R. Center is .C, with .Ls and .Rs for the rear. The extensions .LFE and .SUB are for the subwoofer low frequencies. These file extensions may crisscross with those of other Mac applications on OS X, but it will have no effect on encoding. A.Pack will load them right in. When you load sound files, A.Pack requires that all the source files be the same length, which makes sense. If they are not, the program will lengthen the files to the length of the longest file included in the set. AC-3 streams also must contain some multiple of 1,536 samples, but the program is smart enough to insert silent areas at the end of a channel if it does not come out to exactly such a number.

Collecting and encoding 5.1 surround sound files is not A.Pack's only game. You can actually do some encoding with the program without using a full surround soundscape. For example, you could add a center channel to a stereo mix, using it for voiceover or narration. You could have a stereo sound field with two channels, and then add a LFE track for sound effects or rumbles to accentuate the main channel's dramatic music or narration. Take a mono track and rather than have it play in the center channel, encode it to the rear for a theatrical effect.

Once your audio files are loaded, you have several options for output. You can output multiple files at once by creating a batch list, which is handy if you have a stack of audio files that need to be encoded to AC-3. The program has a few tabbed screens for output tweaking. You can choose to make DVD audio, of course, but you can also choose to encode to an audio-only format for 5.1 audio discs. The export data rate can be altered; however, it defaults to DVD settings.

Several bit-stream modes are preset for different audio settings, such as commentary, music, karaoke, and dialogue. You can set the peak mixing level that you want to come in under, as well as set the amount of compression for music and dialogue. This comes in handy if, for example, you have a large number of commentary tracks and you don't want them to use up a lot of space, or if you wanted to encode at a light compression rate for an important 5.1 music track. (You can also opt for no compression.) You can save your output settings as presets to be used over and over again.

A.Pack has filters to apply such as dialogue normalization, low-pass filter, and digital de-emphasis. Most work on the audio, though, must be done in another program (such as Apple's Logic Pro).

The encoding process is speedy. I was hoping for 2X realtime encoding (as Apple states), but on a dual-processor G4 system I was getting 3.5X for 5.1-channel sound files and 6X to 7X for stereo two-channel encoded files. Basically, A.Pack cranks through encoding on a fast system — helpful for doing batch files.

I had few problems with A.Pack. It would be handy to have at least a mixing bar for each sound channel. I realize that the program is just an encoder, but it sure would be handy if it were integrated into DVD Studio Pro 3 with a few options for filtering and mixing. Otherwise, A.Pack is a welcome addition to the DVD Studio Pro 3 arsenal. Its fast performance and easy interface ensure that you will have 5.1 Dolby Digital sound tracks in your DVD productions sooner than you might think.

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BOTTOM LINE

Company: Apple
Cupertino, Calif.; (408) 996-1010
www.apple.com

Product: DVD Studio Pro 3

Assets: Context-sensitive drop palettes; automatic transcoding upon import; Graphical View shows schematic view of projects

Caveats: Takes up significant screen real estate — use a widescreen display or dual monitors.

Demographic: Professionals who author DVDs.

Price: $499; $199 for upgrade.

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© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.