Am I the only find that finds the following HIGHLY annoying? These are for sure rough edges that in part prevent DVDA from being all it could be.
Text:
Drag a video to a menu. Change font name and size to what you wish. So far so good. Start to type a description. If more than a few words long DVDA with override your selection and change the text to "auto" making it smaller, very small if you have a lot of thumbnails. If you start with the default auto setting the text can be so small you can handly read it, then you have to resize once you're done. Worse, if you drag the handles of the text box to size it this alters kerning meaning each thumbnail can end up a little different. Result: UNPROFESSIONAL if you don't catch it and a lot of unnecessary work fixing it if you do.
Scene Selection Menu Automation:
Overall a nice feature. But the more chapter points you have the smaller the thumbnails get. So you have the following time consuming problem. Assume you have three videos in your DVD project. The first has 4 chapter points, the second has 7 and the third has 12. When you add a scene selection menu to to first the thumbnials and resulting text are fairly large and a size that's acceptable. You make some minor adjustments to size them, and you move on. You add a scene detection menu to the second video. Since it has 7 thumnails it makes the resulting thumnails much smaller. Not good. Ditto for the third video which makes them smaller still.
Your problem is you likely will want to make either the first sub menu thumnails samller or the other two larger so they are are the same size. This is a royal pain and wastes a great deal of time. Just two projects in with DVDA and already this is bugging me big time.
While you can control how many thumnails appear on a sub menu page you should also be able to control the size of the thumnail by PROJECT, otherwise you end up doing lots of grunt work which takes lots of extra time.
Preview plays in seperate window hogging entire screen:
You got to be scratching your head why this is. We're spoiled with Vegas' nice preview window and the timeline displaying on screen at the same time.
When you are trying to get an idea of WHERE in the video you want to add chapter points, why DVDA insists on remvoing the timeline and showing the video playing on a seperate screen I have no idea. I cursed this "feature" so many times already I lost count.
There should be a choice to play seperately or just have the remote float and it wouldn't hurt to have a indicator move on the timeline, like it does in Vegas.
This "feature" again is a BIG time waster. You constantly click back and forth between editing mode and preview mode when you're trying to add chapter points. While you can make a rough guess or nudge using the arrow keys or drag on the timeline you should have much finer control of playback like you do in Vegas. The preview with the remote to the right is fine once you have your project all put together to see how it looks before burning but to edit this way is a nighmare.
Text:
Drag a video to a menu. Change font name and size to what you wish. So far so good. Start to type a description. If more than a few words long DVDA with override your selection and change the text to "auto" making it smaller, very small if you have a lot of thumbnails. If you start with the default auto setting the text can be so small you can handly read it, then you have to resize once you're done. Worse, if you drag the handles of the text box to size it this alters kerning meaning each thumbnail can end up a little different. Result: UNPROFESSIONAL if you don't catch it and a lot of unnecessary work fixing it if you do.
Scene Selection Menu Automation:
Overall a nice feature. But the more chapter points you have the smaller the thumbnails get. So you have the following time consuming problem. Assume you have three videos in your DVD project. The first has 4 chapter points, the second has 7 and the third has 12. When you add a scene selection menu to to first the thumbnials and resulting text are fairly large and a size that's acceptable. You make some minor adjustments to size them, and you move on. You add a scene detection menu to the second video. Since it has 7 thumnails it makes the resulting thumnails much smaller. Not good. Ditto for the third video which makes them smaller still.
Your problem is you likely will want to make either the first sub menu thumnails samller or the other two larger so they are are the same size. This is a royal pain and wastes a great deal of time. Just two projects in with DVDA and already this is bugging me big time.
While you can control how many thumnails appear on a sub menu page you should also be able to control the size of the thumnail by PROJECT, otherwise you end up doing lots of grunt work which takes lots of extra time.
Preview plays in seperate window hogging entire screen:
You got to be scratching your head why this is. We're spoiled with Vegas' nice preview window and the timeline displaying on screen at the same time.
When you are trying to get an idea of WHERE in the video you want to add chapter points, why DVDA insists on remvoing the timeline and showing the video playing on a seperate screen I have no idea. I cursed this "feature" so many times already I lost count.
There should be a choice to play seperately or just have the remote float and it wouldn't hurt to have a indicator move on the timeline, like it does in Vegas.
This "feature" again is a BIG time waster. You constantly click back and forth between editing mode and preview mode when you're trying to add chapter points. While you can make a rough guess or nudge using the arrow keys or drag on the timeline you should have much finer control of playback like you do in Vegas. The preview with the remote to the right is fine once you have your project all put together to see how it looks before burning but to edit this way is a nighmare.