Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
DCP Directory
MillimeterAuthoring a Whole New Story
Jul 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Jeff Sauer
Today you can have total control of your DVD authoring options, but you don't need it if your goal is just getting video onto a compliant disc.
 Sonic DVDCreator is one of many products that falls somewhere between the low and high end of DVD authoring solutions. These mid-range solutions offer more options than consumer tools, without the complexity of the higher-end products. |
It's only been two years since DVD authoring was an esoteric discipline of managing title sets, video objects, color mapping, and pre- and post-commands. Only professional service bureaus and Hollywood studios were serious target markets for system vendors. Today, you can still wrestle with technical jargon and multi-level interfaces if you need total control of DVD authoring options. But you sure don't have to if your goal is just getting video assets onto a compliant disc. From vendors to products to the audience for authoring tools, making DVDs is a different story today.
The once-exclusive craft of putting video and other media onto a disc is going mainstream. Of course, there's a huge range between the professional Scenarists of the authoring world and the MyDVDs and iDVDs that purport to turn home video enthusiasts into authors overnight. For the majority of video professionals, neither extreme automatically fits into daily operations. But several products offer video pros more options than the consumer tools without the interface complexity of the top authoring stations.
Over the next two months, Video Systems will take a closer look at five such authoring applications — Sonic DVDProducer, Sonic ReelDVD, Apple DVD Studio Pro, Pinnacle Systems Impression, and Ulead DVD Workshop — ranging in price from near $4,000 to a mere $299. That's a huge price range, of course, but three- and four-digit prices are still very different from two digits for consumer DVD, and six digits for professional authoring workstations. Each of the mid-range products we will look at has potential for video pros looking to add DVD distribution to their service offerings.
Here, we begin with an overview of the mid-range and explore what you get and what you give up with these more accessible, but professional tools.
The Story Behind the Story
You might think that putting video — MPEG-2 video — on a disc would be pretty straightforward. In a sense it is; video files are just data. The trick is putting video on a disc so it will play in a relatively stupid consumer player rather than a CPU-rich, multipurpose computer. Minimally, everything needs to be in exactly the right place on the disc and in precisely the right format. Add to that the rich interactivity and navigation possible from consumer players, and it's easier to understand the required programming intricacy.
Behind any DVD authoring tool is a back-end engine that organizes assets and translates work done in the user interface into DVD-compliant operations. Regardless of how many features an interface offers, a lot of the work behind the scenes is the same. In some cases, the back-end engine is similar code. The difference in performance is strictly how much of the engine a given interface lets you use.
With the market for rich, high-end systems reaching saturation, DVD-authoring companies have expanded offerings to reach new customers, fronting DVD engines with easier-to-use interfaces. Originally, that meant companies slicing and dicing the market opportunities and their products with very similar interfaces, but feature restrictions. The result was unnecessarily difficult tools for doing simple tasks. Needless to say, many of those companies no longer exist.
Today, the names have changed almost completely, and so have the interfaces. Of the authoring companies that existed two years ago, only Sonic remains strong. Sonic's acquisition of Daikin balances its high-end, Mac-based DVD Creator with the Windows-based Scenarist. ReelDVD, also originally a Daikin product, is now positioned a step below Sonic DVDProducer and a step above Sonic DVDit!. Minerva's DVD authoring assets were purchased by Pinnacle Systems, which now offers Impression (a sub-$1,000 authoring software) and Express ($49) for consumers.
But it's the new companies jumping into the market that truly have started a new chapter in DVD authoring. Apple's acquisition of Astarte gives the Mac OS a solid mid-range authoring product in DVD Studio Pro, but it's Apple's consumer iDVD that has been the real catalyst for change. Bundled with the so-called SuperDrive (an OEM Pioneer DVR-AO3), Apple has tried to make DVD authoring and video production trendy, with national advertising focusing on the joys and possibilities of communicating with video. The response in the industry is a handful of Windows companies with eyes on the same consumer market, including Dazzle (DVD Complete), MedioStream (NeoDVD), Ulead (DVD MovieFactory), and Sonic (MyDVD).
Of course, consumer interfaces are mostly impractical for video professionals, but they do require an equally proficient back-end engine for simple operations — getting video onto a compliant disc — that professionals would perform. What's more, to attract consumers with no-brain ease-of-use, consumer interfaces have pushed the limits in ways that higher-end tools should eventually follow.
For example, Sonic MyDVD includes a direct-to-DVD feature that automates the process of capturing DV, transcoding to MPEG-2, creating menus and chapters through scene recognition, and burning a disc, all with a single-button click. MedioStream's NeoDVD Plus does one better, with clear professional implications for quick tape-to-disc transfers. The $39 NeoDVD Plus software allows for capture straight to disc, with realtime transcode of an incoming video stream and on-the-fly burning of the live stream to an attached drive.
Consumer applications typically use templates to automatically position menu and buttons, with the first frame of any clip as the default button graphic. You won't find templates in very many professional tools (Ulead's $299 DVD Workshop with optional templates is the exception), and that's too bad. Of course, pros need the ability to go beyond templates in most cases, but authoring companies should offer similar time-saving features to help speed production. Button creation tools within the authoring environment and automatic positioning of buttons that look “good enough” would often eliminate hassles for professionals trying to save time.
Ultimately, the biggest gains in authoring may have little to do with authoring features, but rather with the increased availability of affordable DVD burners. This began more than a year ago when Pioneer came out with the less-than-$1,000 DVR-AO3, which Apple bundled in certain G4 computer configurations. More recently, competition among competing DVD-R/DVD-RW, DVD-RAM, and DVD+RW formats has only benefited DVD-Video authoring, with prices dropping to less than $400 for a variety of burning solutions.
Cliff Notes
It's probably no surprise that more affordable, professional authoring software offers much of the basic gist of top systems: The 80-20 rule of doing most of what you need most often applies. These applications may be short of some details, but where time is money and just finishing and outputting a project with relative elegance is the focus, they can be aptly capable.
Any professional tool can create a compliant DVD-Video disc image and burn it to a DVD-R. Even the consumer products do that. However, if you're creating a DVD disc image for large-scale replication, DLT tape is the traditionally expected format and the most affordable tools (for example, Ulead DVD Workshop, Sonic DVDit!, and any consumer software) don't support it. Support for dual-layer discs is also an issue, although interestingly, price has less to do with whether a product supports it. Ulead's $299 has it, and two less-than-$1,000 tools — Pinnacle Impression and Sonic ReelDVD — do not. DVD authoring is now seeing simultaneous migration from top down and from consumer up, and each company has different priorities.
 Apple’s iDVD sparked a boom in the DVD consumer market. Companies such as Dazzle, MedioStream, Ulead, and Sonic are now going after that growing market. |
With any professional authoring interface you'll also have the ability to import custom graphics for buttons and menus and position buttons manually, as opposed to relying on the template layouts of most consumer products. Fancy motion menus, which play the video inside a menu button, are now supported by almost any product above a consumer level, except Sonic DVDit!. Most, but not all, also support subtitle streams, Dolby digital audio, multiple audio streams, slide shows, and 16:9 aspect ratios, although the method and ease by which each is accomplished varies. Any serious product now supports creating charter marks.
Not surprisingly, it's the least expensive tools — Ulead DVD Workshop and Sonic DVDit! — that miss on some of those common features. If you think you'll need to go beyond the basics, you'll need to look higher end.
Also, it may be obvious to some prospective users, but video image quality is not a determining factor in choosing an authoring tool, assuming you have access to an MPEG encoder. Any DVD authoring software, save a couple of consumer-oriented tools, can import pre-encoded MPEG-2 files and create VOB, or Video Object, files that will become the assets of the DVD disc image. Interestingly, the higher end you go, the less flexible things get and the more likely it is that those files will need to be very specific elementary streams. Consumer and most corporate applications will automatically de-multiplex MPEG system streams, while some top systems will not.
Video quality may become an issue in that more affordable products typically include software MPEG encoders and can accept AVI, DV, or QuickTime files as source. For convenience and speed, these tools will often automatically transcode, but they may or may not allow for user-controlled bit-rate.
Missing Pages
What you lose by choosing a more affordable authoring tool, compared to the premium systems, is control. Some of the features are esoteric and some are important, depending on your needs. For example, few video professionals working on corporate videos will need to be concerned about the absence of parental control that will place restrictions on who can watch. Similarly, copyright protection is less likely to be required for a corporate disc. However, service bureaus authoring Hollywood movies for mass distribution will need all those tools and gravitate toward the exclusive systems that have them.
Few of the affordable products support any tight integration with encoding hardware, such as segment-based re-encoding and inverse telecine. Sonic DVD Producer comes the closest with its Sonic SD-1000 encoder option. On the other hand, the software encoders included with many affordable products are more practical given today's faster processors and improved encoding and transcoding quality.
You'll need to go high-end for features like closed captioning and karaoke support. DVD's multi-angle feature, which allows a user to switch on-the-fly between different angles of the same scene, is also a high-end feature, though it is possible in DVD Producer and, to a limited extent, in Pinnacle's Impression.
Much of the difference between the higher-end systems is in navigation control. While consumer-oriented products rarely go beyond “play and return to the previous menu,” professional tools generally support more intricate post-commands that allow the author to link videos together or to have completed videos go to a new menu. A few affordable tools allow you to set Previous and Next chapter or video links, but few systems below the top products allow the author to use the programmability supported by the DVD specification.
Full support of the 16 GPRM (General Parameter Register Memory) codes and 16 SPRM (System Parameter) gives authors access to uncommon user interaction from a DVD player's remote control. For example, training DVDs can force a viewer to watch clips in the proper order. Programming is also often critical for interactive kiosks and point of sales titles.
Looking Forward
Next month, Video Systems will take an in-depth look at Apple DVD Studio Pro and Sonic DVD Producer. In September, we'll look at three affordable tools: Sonic ReelDVD, Pinnacle Systems Impression Pro, and Ulead DVD Workshop.
Contributing editor Jeff Sauer is a video producer, industry consultant, and the director of the Desktop Video Group, a video and computer products testing lab in Cambridge, Mass. Contact him at jeff@dtv group.com.
feedback
To comment on this article, email the Video Systems editorial staff at vsfeedback@primediabusiness.com.
