What do you Vegas editors use for your compositor (After Effects, Boris, Combustion, etc.), and what do you use as your dvd authoring program?
I'm especially interested in the answers if you shoot in 24p or 24p advanced.
Thanks-
If you spend some time reviewing old posts spanning several months you'll see both AE and B have fans here. If I remember correctly I think SPOT among his many other talents was also a beta tester for Boris.
As far as DVD Authoring if you have no need to get overly fancy Sony's DVD Architect while just in its first version is impressivle in spite of it currently lacking things like end actions. Still you can crank out some impressive DVD's with a little effort.
I use After Effects, although there are powerful compositing abilities built right into Vegas and I will use it if I don't need some special trick that is only available in After Effects.
DVD authoring... my "go to" program at the moment is DVDLab from Mediachance.com. I've also been playing with Adobe's Encore DVD. v1.0 is a bit buggy, but it does some very cool things. I had been using Sonic DVDit! PE, but I never liked the user interface.
DVD Architect for authoring though I am looking DVDLab looks pretty interesting that Softcorps linked to. I just forked out a chunk of money on Combustion 3 and I think it is worth the money. I know there are allot of AE people out there but C's interface is so much more intuitive than AE which feels very clunky to me, plus it comes with RE-Flex a $600 dollar morphing program that integrates with it very cool! But really if I were you I would download the demo's of each and see which feels the most natural to you (though they don't have a demo of Combustion 3 yet you can download 2.1 which looks and feels identical to 3) and play with them before you decide to spend the money on one.
A word of caution for all the DVD Lab users out there, that program allows yout to create discs that are not within the DVD Spec. This can cause playback problems, compatability problems, and a lot of replicators and duplicators that use any kind of verification process (the good ones) won't touch them. I know a lot of people "think" this is a great program and are amazed at the price, it is true that you do get what you pay for. I would avoid that program if at all possible if you are doing professional DVD's.
Boris and Commotion Pro are my favorites. After Effects used to be, but Boris kicks it's butt now, and Boris lives right in Vegas. Vegas offers more Boris options (currently) than any other host.
DVD Architect is the most stable, and most compliant authoring tool there is at any sub 5K price, but it's feature-poor. Right now I'm totally in love with Ulead's Workshop 2, and Apple's DVD Studio 3.0 for authoring. Worshop 2 is not shipping til Feb from what I'm hearing, which means perhaps a little later.
I keep hearing about DVDlab does DVD's "not to DVD specs" I use the program and love it's authoring. I have never had a DVD NOT play in any species of stand alone or PC player I have done a DVD for. Please tell me just how it does a DVD not to spec?
I have duplicated DVDlab's DVD's in my burner many times. I think Oscar is doing a pretty good job.
Its a complex issue similar to the pitfalls of not following W3C "specs" actually recomendations when authoring web pages. While you can make "prettier" web pages by not strickly following guidlelines the danger is they may not display properly in SOME browsers.
The specs for both burning DVD's and making web pages are there for a reason, so what you make works on ALL, more preciesly on most DVD players or in the case of web pages in all browsers no matter who's or how old a version.
While DVD Labs is a nice application, and what you do with it may play fine in YOUR DVD player some things may not work in other DVD players which is important if you're authoring for a wider universe which of course some here are.
Awhile back there was a thread here or in the Vegas forum where someone made a family memories kind of DVD that was to be distributed to various family members. I forget who authored it but the poor guy kept reburning the disc because one lady couldn't get it to play right on her player, even after several revisions and that was following specs. Imagine if he used something else, made 50 copies and got back a half a dozen complaints all different, all requiring more reburning. I for one don't want to open that can of worms.
For one thing just look at when you import a video file. The program asks you if you want to leave it as is, or convert it to the proper spec which takes a lot of time if you don't have the right file. You can easily just say no and leave the file as is without Demultiplexing. The screen says it will "probably" fail during compiling or playing. I'd prefer to use a program that checks the file thouroughly to make absolutely sure it is completely compliant before I send it out to my clients and their customers. I know lots of people that say they have imported files that weren't within the spec and the program let it go without notifying them.
That's just one of the bigger problems, there are a lot more but I don't have nearly the time to list all of them.
I'll stick with my good ol' Fusion system, if it isn't within the DVD Spec, it won't even import into the program. That way I know for sure that my clients and their customers get discs that will play, and therefore I stay in buisness.
If DVDLab checks the files and gives you a warning and you choose to ignore it, how is that the fault of DVDLab? If one makes certain that their files are in spec when they are encoded, there is no problem.
I believe it was here in this forum that someone said that they had checked DVDLab authored discs using the official Philips DVD compliance testing software and that the DVDLab discs had passed the tests.
We all gravitate to the solutions that work for us and you don't think that DVDLab will meet your needs. I'm cool with that. I understand that no one wants to use software they don't trust, particularly if your business depends on it. I have authored close to fifty projects in DVDLab and distributed hundreds of discs and I have not received one complaint yet. So far, I have no reason not to trust DVDLab.
Do you have a link to a web page or forum that lists the rest of the DVDLab problems?
Thanks for the info on DVDLab. I, too, would love to see some testing results on compatibility issues for various authoring packages. Anecdotal input is very useful but, absent testing results, it is often tough to sort out what the real source of compatibility problems might be (media quality, cockpit error, player issues, DVD burner used, etc.).
I hope someone can provide a link. I've got a really kludgy workaround to the DVD Architect end actions, but it has many, many other problems, and I've got to find another solution, but don't want to open a can of worms (DVDA, for all its many faults, does seem to produce discs that play).
As Jsnkc said, the program (DVDLab) "allows" you to create non-compliant discs. It's utterly your choice if you want to try and put SVCD movies on your DVD. I've found that creating a NTSC-DVD mpg file in Vegas, then letting DVDLab de-mux it works best for me. (You can open several instances of DVDLab so you can be de-muxing one file in another copy of DVDLab while you fashion DVD menus in the other -- or just go back to working in Vegas).
DVDLab works on the premise that you bring in compliant files. It's main job is to help you create menus and links, then create a DVD from your compliant files and the menus and links you've created. It warns you if your doing something questionable.
The slickest program out there is DVDA. If I hadn't been in a budget crisis the last year and a half I would have bought it. When they include end-actions it will be perfect for someone like me, and probably for many professional videographers.
OK always bring in a .m2v video and an .ac3 audio into DVDlab and I have never had a warning about anything not being compliant. I stand by my earlier post except thanks for the compatibility test and I agree the if you trust DVDA and can afford it by all means use it. For me the pocket book wasn't fat enough for Vegas and DVDA but it handled Vegas and DVDlab quite nicely.