DVD Studio Pro 2
Apple, $499
DVD Authoring Program
| DV Score: | |
| Pros: | Outstanding value with great price/performance ratio. Scalable feature set accommodates a wide range of users. |
| Cons: | Lacks NTSC preview. Can't create Dolby AC-3 sync tracks. No support for DTS audio. |
| Bottom Line | Missing several key features necessary for professional authoring, but it's capable of authoring about 90 percent of the discs being published today with unmatched ease of use. |
After Apple announced the purchase of Spruce Technologies in July of 2001, many users of the PC-based Spruce Maestro-myself included-held their breath waiting to hear the fate of their high-end DVD authoring systems. Well, many turned blue in the face, as not a peep was uttered from Cupertino until NAB 2003, when Apple announced DVD Studio Pro 2.
After wading through the crowd surrounding the only DVD Studio Pro demo station on the show floor, I had my chance to mouse around for a bit. Compared with the interface of Spruce Maestro running on Window NT 4.0, DVD Studio Pro 2 seemed so, well, pretty antialiased, in all its 24-bit glory. Digging a little deeper, I found all the familiar Maestro features: the Timeline, Connections window, and the project Outline.
Some names had changed (Playlists were now Stories and Command Sequences were now Scripts), and some features were completely new (Slideshows as a specialized element type). Could it be that I could now replace my $25,000 authoring system with this $500 piece of software? I set out to answer this question by authoring a feature film, Federico Fellini's La Strada, for my company, The Criterion Collection.
While users of Final Cut Pro will feel at home with DVD Studio Pro's timeline-centered workflow, users of previous versions of DVD Studio Pro will have to make some adjustments. Apple has done away with Track Objects and flowchart diagrams in favor of the multi-track convention from Spruce Maestro, offering users the ability to integrate nine angles of video, eight streams of audio, and 32 subtitle streams in one window.
Spruce veterans, on the other hand, will feel right at home. Almost every interface convention from Maestro is employed in DVD Studio Pro 2. Apple being Apple, the designers made every effort to make the Maestro interface as intuitive and user-friendly as possible, and they have succeeded gloriously.
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| Apple DVD Studio Pro 2 has the power to perform great feats of authoring strength. |
DVD Studio Pro's interface allows the user to see almost all of the information for a project at a single glance while remaining easy on the eyes. As usual, a bigger display is better. I'd recommend a 20-inch display as a minimum requirement for heavy-duty authoring, with a 23-inch Apple Cinema Display being ideal.
The unique thing that Apple has done with version 2 is to make the entire application scalable. At startup you're given the choice of three interface configurations: Basic, Extended, and Advanced. The Basic configuration, with only a window for menu layout and a palette of templates, looks like iDVD. Extended mode adds a timeline along the bottom and the project Outline window to the left of the Menu Editor.
The Advanced configuration replicates Spruce Maestro's four-quadrant interface and provides access to the Menu Editor, Timeline, Outline view, and Asset Manager. While the quadrants are very efficient in their design, the Advanced mode really requires at least a 20-inch display, especially if you want to be able to see your menus at full resolution. Fortunately each quadrant is adjustable, so when you find a custom layout that works for you and your system, you can save it and recall it later with one keystroke. With this scalable complexity, Apple is essentially rolling the entire product line of a company like Sonic Solutions, which offers entry-, mid-, and pro-level authoring applications, into one program.
I started by importing all of the prepared La Strada files into the Assets tab. As a Spruce user, I was delighted to find that DVD Studio Pro allowed me to organize all of my content into labeled folders and subfolders. This feature is important for complex projects and one that Maestro painfully lacks. Click on a file in the Assets tab and all of its properties appear in the context-sensitive, floating Inspector window. If the file is a video file, a small thumbnail appears at the bottom of the window, with a scrubber for shuttling through the clip. Double-click the filename in the Assets tab and the file appears in the Viewer tab for full-size preview-a nice touch.
Most authoring applications require you to encode your content as DVD-compliant streams before you can import it. Alternatively, DVD Studio Pro 2 allows you to import any file that is QuickTime compatible. Since there is an encoding engine built in, any file that is non-DVD compliant will either be compressed when you build the project or in the background while you work, based on a user preference. While this is a handy feature, if you're encoding hours of video at best-quality settings your build times could run into the tens of hours. Best to do it before the final compile of your project. With that said, Apple has obviously put a lot of time into both the built-in QuickTime MPEG encoder and the new bundled Compressor. Speed and quality have improved dramatically since DVD Studio Pro 1.5.
With assets imported, I had several options for turning my files into menus and tracks. Drag a video asset into the Outline tab and a new track appears with the asset's filename. Drag a still image and a menu is automatically created-very convenient.
When you drag an asset over the Menu Editor, a Drop Palette automatically pops up, much like in Final Cut Pro's Canvas window. This Drop Palette provides options such as setting a menu background, creating a button, or even creating a button that's automatically linked to a new track. The Drop Palette options are context-sensitive and are based on whether you 're dragging video, audio, or still-image file, and where you are dragging it to.
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| The Track Timeline for La Strada contains one video stream, three audio streams, and one subtitle stream. The purple Chapter Markers were imported from a text file. |
Here's an example of the power the Drop Palette provides. After setting up a track with the video, audio, and subtitle streams for La Strada, I dragged the track icon from the Outline tab to the Menu Editor. When the Drop Palette appeared, I selected Create Button and Chapter Index. DVD Studio Pro automatically created a button and a submenu, based on a template of my choosing, with all of the chapter markers from the track mapped to individual buttons.
In general, this kind of built-in intelligence makes the program a joy to use, but there are times when maybe it is a little too intelligent. For example, the subtitles for the film were created by a service bureau and delivered as a Scenarist-format SON file with a folder of corresponding TIFF files. For some reason the subtitle provider saves the TIFFs at 150 dpi rather than screen-resolution 72 dpi. This disconnect has never been a problem in Spruce Maestro, which just ignores the resolution metadata. But because DVD Studio Pro 2 imported the TIFFs at 150 dpi, they appeared tiny in the frame. A quick batch action in Photoshop solved the problem, but not before a lot of head scratching.
After setting up tracks for all of my assets, I was ready to create the menus. Apple has obviously directed most of its efforts toward the Menu Editor.
In previous versions of DVD Studio Pro, as well as Maestro, menu creation required the use of a graphics program such as Photoshop. But DVD Studio Pro 2 has a compositing engine built right in. DVD authors can now type text for buttons, create overlays, or even position and resize video over a still or moving background, all without switching to external graphics editors. You can even activate rulers and alignment guides. An integrated graphics tool is certainly handy for quickly generating menus, but exacting menu design will still require Photoshop. Motion menus can be previewed instantly without rendering in both the menu editor and the simulator.
Apple has also included over thirty predesigned menu templates. Pick a design you like from the Palette tab, customize the text for your project, link up your tracks to the menu buttons, and you're done. While the supplied templates are primarily geared toward hobbyists and wedding/event videographers, the Palette tab also provides options for creating custom templates, making it very easy for a professional authoring facility to incorporate this feature into its workflow.
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| The Connections window shows the Sources for Chapter index2a in the left column and the linked Targets in the middle, The right column contains every possible Target in the project. |
Full-featured scripting is provided in DVD Studio Pro 2 through a polished update of Spruce Maestro's Command Sequences. Add a script and the Script Editor tab appears with the associated Script Inspectors. Enhancements to the scripting engine include Pre-scripts that run whenever you access the menu or track to which they are assigned, a Special category of elements types for compare operations, and the new Exit and Jump Indirect Commands.
Hardcore Spruce users who depend on Maestro's 16 GPRM registers will certainly be disappointed to find that DVD Studio Pro 2 only supports eight, but it does provide for assigning a unique name to each register.
With the tracks and menus in place I switched to the Connections tab to link all of my menu buttons and track sources to their targets. What are sources and targets? An example would be a chapter index menu with buttons linked to each chapter marker in the video track. The menu button for chapter 1 is the source, while chapter marker 1 in the track is the target. The previous design of this feature in Spruce suffered from space constraints-in a complex project, you couldn't see all of a disc's sources and targets at once without adjusting the interface.
Apple has done two things to make this Connections window work better. First, they provide the option for vertical orientation of the window, with sources on the left and targets on the right. This design provides for more rows of text, improving on Maestro's limited top/bottom orientation.
Second, Apple made the Targets pane hierarchical like the list view in a Finder window, allowing you to open and close target groups (Menus, Tracks, or Scripts) like folders. In vertical mode, the sources appear on the left and the available targets on the right.
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| The Menu Inspector on the left show the general settings for a looping motion menu with audio. Other settings are available in the additional tabbed palettes. |
While you can drag a target from the right column to connect it to a target on the left, Apple has provided a keyboard-centric alternative. The up and down arrow keys allow you to navigate your sources column. With your source highlighted, hold down the control key to switch to the targets column; the up and down arrow keys now let you choose a target. Press return and your connection is made. In a complex project with hundreds of connections, this feature makes fast work of linking up the elements on your disc.
When everything is in place, it's time to compile. Apple apparently has done some serious optimization in updating the compiler. Compiling involves building file structures and multiplexing the elementary audio, video, and subtitle streams. After testing my project in the Simulator and fixing any kinks, I hit the Build button. My jaw dropped as the text in the Build Log raced by so fast I couldn't even read it, and this was only on a dual-867 MHz G4. To compare performance of Spruce Maestro to DVD Studio Pro 2, I tested compiling speeds. In Spruce Maestro, Disc 1 of La Strada, a DVD-9, compiled in 32 minutes on a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4. The same disc compiled in 16 minutes with DVD Studio Pro 2 on the dual-867 GHz G4.
So, will DVD professionals around the world be trading in their high-priced turnkey systems for Apple's $499 software? DVD Studio Pro 2 is not far off the mark, but it's missing several key features necessary for professional authoring.
The list of omissions starts with the lack of NTSC preview, an absolute necessity for testing overlay colors and subtitle placement.
Another one of the Spruce features missing in DVD Studio Pro 2 is the ability to create Dolby AC-3 sync tracks. DVD-9 projects require splitting tracks over two DVD-Rs before the title can be tested on a set-top player. For these projects, the ability to take a feature-length AC-3 stream and split it in sync at the layer-break is a huge timesaver. DVD Studio Pro 2 is also missing support for DTS audio, a requirement for most feature film authoring.
Then there is the question of compatibility since, despite the version 2 moniker, this is basically a complete rewrite of the application. With the plethora of set-top players on the market, compatibility is no small issue. Many authoring facilities rely on their high-end DVD authoring systems not just for a set of features, but because they are thoroughly tested: the discs they make will play on most any set-top player, and when problems do arise, there are known workarounds.
Previous incarnations of DVD Studio Pro had trouble creating functional-much less compatible-discs, so only time will tell whether version 2 holds any surprises for DVD authors. But initial indications are good. At Criterion, we authored and replicated a rather simple DVD-5 project, and the testing facility report showed no playback anomalies from a matrix of over a hundred DVD players. At press time, we had just sent off our La Strada disc for replication. Preliminary reports were that there were no problems. We will use DVD Studio Pro 2 to author a dual-layer DVD-9 disc in the coming weeks, which will be sent out for extensive testing.
What is certain is that Apple has dramatically reshaped the DVD authoring playing field. Many of DVD Studio Pro 2's features have never been available before at such a low price. DVD Studio Pro 2 is capable of authoring about 90 percent of the discs being published today, with ease of use that's simply unmatched.
| DVD Studio Pro 2 | |
| System Requirements: | Macintosh with 733 MHz or faster PowerPC processor (G4 minimum); Mac OS X v10.2.6; 256 MB RAM (512 MB recommended); QuickTime 6.3; AGP graphics card with 8 MB of VRAM (32 MB recommended). |
DAVID PHILLIPS is the Manager of DVD Development at The Criterion Collection, a video publisher of international film classics located in New York City.