DVD Architect needs features to anticipate where the DVD burning market is going.
As your customers burn more and more DVDs, they will eventually want to go back to those DVDs, retrieve video clips, and compile new DVDs from those clips. Unfortunately, neither Vegas 4.0c, nor DVD-A 1.0c provide any features to make this easy. If most media assets in the future are going to reside on DVD, then not providing simple, direct access to those assets completely misses where the market is going to be in just a few months. If I were product manager for DVD-A, I would put this at the top of my list for the next release, beacause it anticipates where the market is going, rather than just responding to where it is today.
While I'm on the subject of managing media assets, the other problem SOFO needs to address in DVD-A is how multiple media clips are converted into different title sets. It is my understanding that each input video stream must be converted into a different title set. This means that if I create three different MPEG files in Vegas, and then put these into DVD-A, then I can never get all three of these to play, without interruption. Instead, they are converted into different title sets, and the DVD player will always go back to the menu and force the viewer to press a button on the remote to play the next title.
What SOFO needs to do is put an option in DVD-A to combine multiple MPEG (or AVI) files into one title set. If the MPEG files are all encoded at the same bitrate, this combination should be done without re-encoding (except perhaps for a few frames at the boundaries between clips). What I do today to get around this limitation is merge the MPEG files into one, using the "Merge" function in TMPGEnc. It works. I know it can be done.
Such a feature would greatly expand the utility of the first feature I requested above, namely the ability to re-use and re-purpose the thousands of hours of media that I will soon have on all the DVDs that I have burned.
Now, if you really want to start anticipating where the market will be in a few years, what we eventually will need is a really good media management system that will let us track, find, and use a specific clip hiding somewhere in that stack of five thousand DVDs on my shelf ...
As your customers burn more and more DVDs, they will eventually want to go back to those DVDs, retrieve video clips, and compile new DVDs from those clips. Unfortunately, neither Vegas 4.0c, nor DVD-A 1.0c provide any features to make this easy. If most media assets in the future are going to reside on DVD, then not providing simple, direct access to those assets completely misses where the market is going to be in just a few months. If I were product manager for DVD-A, I would put this at the top of my list for the next release, beacause it anticipates where the market is going, rather than just responding to where it is today.
While I'm on the subject of managing media assets, the other problem SOFO needs to address in DVD-A is how multiple media clips are converted into different title sets. It is my understanding that each input video stream must be converted into a different title set. This means that if I create three different MPEG files in Vegas, and then put these into DVD-A, then I can never get all three of these to play, without interruption. Instead, they are converted into different title sets, and the DVD player will always go back to the menu and force the viewer to press a button on the remote to play the next title.
What SOFO needs to do is put an option in DVD-A to combine multiple MPEG (or AVI) files into one title set. If the MPEG files are all encoded at the same bitrate, this combination should be done without re-encoding (except perhaps for a few frames at the boundaries between clips). What I do today to get around this limitation is merge the MPEG files into one, using the "Merge" function in TMPGEnc. It works. I know it can be done.
Such a feature would greatly expand the utility of the first feature I requested above, namely the ability to re-use and re-purpose the thousands of hours of media that I will soon have on all the DVDs that I have burned.
Now, if you really want to start anticipating where the market will be in a few years, what we eventually will need is a really good media management system that will let us track, find, and use a specific clip hiding somewhere in that stack of five thousand DVDs on my shelf ...