a Sony guy at the Iowa DTV Symposium

did you get a name?

If your friend does not need any formats beyond DV, he should get Vegas on a PC. What OS does he normally use? Is he going to be doing this professionally?

beerandchips, was he a Sony digital pictures media software guy? or a parent company Sony guy?

In the listed speakers there was a Sony guy talking about Sony optical disks.
http://www.iptv.org/dtv/2003/speakers.cfm#18

I'm know very little about Mac's but I keep hearing that Apple really took their time and got it right with the DVD authoring program that goes with FCP. Anybody seen it?

This is funny - as I was reading this an email poped up with this little snippet in it:

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--Film editor Walter Murch says...
"I've never been picky about the method or system [for editing films]. I've edited on every type of system available. I like the challenge of switching platforms, and I think it's good that in the non-linear world, there is now competition and a variety of options. I think that will make everyone's tools better and give editors more choices.

"But Final Cut Pro does represent a wonderful 100th birthday present for modern film editing, which really began around 1903. The notion of non-proprietary software systems that can run on CPUs, without special hardware, combined with Apple's courageous decision to use the XML protocol, which is wide open to all third-party developers to interface with, is huge. We can export media as QuickTimes that do not require decryption or decoding to be read on the other end. That's far preferable, in my view.

"The only limitation now is processor power, not resolution, because these tools can work at any resolution if we have enough processor power. That power will improve, removing resolution limitations for working in realtime. That means, eventually, I can provide a finished cut right out of the edit. What will come out of the edit room will be the finished product--no answer prints. You'll turn in a finished version of the film and copies will be cloned and distributed, and that will be your film."

--Academy Award-winning film editor Walter Murch on what he calls the evolution of non-linear editing--using Final Cut Pro to edit feature films. Murch, the first editor to win an Oscar for editing a feature film digitally (The English Patient in 1996), recently completed cutting Cold Mountain, using Final Cut Pro version 3.0. See the November 30th Anniversary issue of Millimeter for a detailed look at Murch's groundbreaking work on Cold Mountain and his thoughts about the future of non-linear editing.
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I have to wonder if his comment of "I've edited on every type of system available" includes editing with every NLE software available as well. If not - hey Sony marketing - get this guy a copy of Vegas.

"DVD authoring program that goes with FCP. Anybody seen it? "

I think that would be DVD Studio Pro 2, it is by far one of the best DVD Authoring Programs out there. Apart from spending thosands of dollars on a Fusion or Scenerist system it is as good as you can get. It has all the professional features you would want. I just bought a used G4 just so I could use the program becasue all of the authoring packages on the PC are either Way overpriced, or don't have any of the features a professional DVD Authorer needs.

As far as Final cut vs. Vegas, that I have no idea, I have played around with Final cut Express and find that Vegas is A lot easier to use. But I still haven't used it enought to give a good opinion on it.

Back three years ago there were two PC-based authoring programs that cost a fortune but were incredibly powerful and flexible. The first was Scenarist, which is still available for many thousands of dollars. The second was DVD Maestro, which was offered by a company called Spruce and was also many thousands of dollars. The general consensus was that both were about equally powerful, yet Maestro was much easier to learn.

In 2001, Apple bought Spruce and immediately discontinued Maestro. The Spruce team was absorbed into Apple, and DVD Studio Pro 2 is the result of their efforts.

I bought a copy of Maestro last year. You can still find it from time to time on eBay, and I've even seen it floating around the Internet. You have to bring your assets into the program already encoded in MPEG2 and AC-3. It does multiple audio streams, dual-layer, multiple angles, the works.

For me, the main thing about most of the DVD packages for PC that disappoints is the lack of customizable end-actions and menu selection actions. Something as simple as "play, and repeat until I stop you" seems to be too much for many of the consumer level packages. Why? Did they just forget it, or is it that costly to include? Admittedly, I have not put the money into DVD authoring that I might have to later, but right now, if someone were to ask me to create a DVD for a kiosk situation, I would be stuck.

I have held off on even looking at DVD LAB because of some comments I read here about it creating out-of-spec discs. It's an affordable package but I need DVD's that play. I think it does have a lot of end-action and menu action choices. Have the makers of DVD Lab addressed the concerns about DVD spec's?

I think the main reason that the consumer level packages don't offer end actions and things like that is becasue once you start doing that you really need to get into the scripting aspect of the DVD Spec and it can be very overwhelming for a lot of people. I used to use DVDit and the Ulead packages, we then got a Sonic Fusion system. I was completely lost, we went through various training programs and demos, read many books and now I feel that I have a good grasp on it. We got the system in January of this year and I'd say I finally got comfortable with it about 4-6 months later. Once you start adding the more advances features (even thought they may seem simple) you need to learn a LOT more about the DVD spec and how it actually works and what you can and can't do with it.

DVD Studio Pro is actually one of the simplest interfaces I have seen in a Professional authoring package, but it can still be VERY confusing to somone who has been using consumer packages like DVDit and DVDA. There is a much bigger learning curve.

Interesting. Looks like I had been making some wrong assumptions about authoring packages that let you select end, or beginning, actions. I thought it was as simple as a menu that says "what should happen when this disc is first loaded, and, what should happen when it has played to the end, or, what should happen when the user navigates to a menu item. I did not know there was deeper programming stuff involved on the end-users part. Yes, thanks for the info.

End actions can be simple if you're just going back to the main menu after playing a video in that title set, but lets say after the video played you wanted it to go to a diffrent menu in a diffrent title set, then it can be more complicated and invlolve a diffrent script.

If anyone really wants to get deep into the DVD spec and learn how DVD's really work I would highly suggest picking up a copy of DVD Demystified, it is basically the bible of all things DVD coming in at 691 Pages written by Jim Taylor. it will explain just how complex DVD authoring can become.

I would imagine that, over time, the scripting issues will be dealt with so as not to prevent those of us who technically challenged to achieve the desired results in authoring DVDs.

As an example I would give Java script. Something I never was able to grasp. Now, many of the web authoring tools automatically write the "script" for you.

I'm not so sure that they will, I know most of the consumer dvd packages today do a really good job of masking pretty much everything script-wise and making it as simple as possible to author simple DVD's. I have used pretty much everything out there and I think that DVD Studio pro is about as simple as it can be to author "professional" dvd's. There is still a big learning curve coming from programs like DVDit and DVDa, but once you grasp it it can be very powerful.

Maybe with the introduction of the new Blue Ray and HD-DVD coming next year the specs of them will be a little easier to work with than the current DVD spec. But right now the spec is what it is, it isn't going to change.

Ah, Jason, one thing I've learned when it comes to technology is to never say never. ;o)

Such things have, do, and will progress. Change and improvements in these areas are inevitable.

But once the new HD-DVD's and Blue Ray's hit next year I'm sure DVD's and their authoring programs will kind of be put on the back burner and everyone will be developing programs for the new medium. From what I have read so far the "new" DVD-spec for these discs will be diffrent from what the current DVD spec is.

I really know nothing about Java, or much about HTML programming even but knowing the DVD spec and how you need to work with it I don't really forsee anyone coming up with a simple authoring package that anyone could use. With DVD there isn't really one way to do certain things, and many diffrent methods will work, that is why I don't see a simplified program besing able to account for all the diffrent variables. I could be wrong, and if someone can prove me wrong I'm sure they will soon be millionaires :)

I've come accross the Spruce technologies wb site on more than one ocassion and they still seem to be developing / marketing a DVD authoring package for PCs. Still sell it as DVD Maestro.

Apple did do their DVD tools well. DVD Studio Pro is a GREAT DVD authoring app. On the Mac side, it's very useful, untypically intuitive, and sweet. That said, FCP can't hold a candle to Vegas when it comes to speed and stability. I do have both, along with hardware for my FCP/G4. It's a good tool, but frankly, the Vegas workflow makes more sense, it's faster, and the only thingVegas lacks is the hardware support for certain formats. And THAT lack, seems to be trivial. Lately I've spent a lot of time asking folks if they REALLY want to see HD support in Vegas with hardware, and while many/most say 'yes,' when they realize the investment (over 50K) to MINIMALLY get into HD, most then say "I didn't realize it was so expensive" and say they'd rather have other feature upgrades.
As far as the guy from Sony that allegedly said Vegas wouldn't have major upgrades, etc, either the guy at the seminar was talking out of his backside, or Beer and Chips misheard him. Duh,....why would Sony keep the Vegas team intact and on payroll if they didn't intend on seeing Vegas grow? It's not like anyone is into throwing money away... I for one, certainly expect great things from Sony's software.
As far as the G5 being the 'fastest computer' out there, I've done several tests of my 3.6HT against a G5. The G5 in Photoshop is slower, when working on the same file, same actions, same output format. I've only had one crash with my G4 under Jaguar, but have had several crashes under Panther.

3.6HT. Is that overclocked or 3.06?

2road,there have been a lot of discussuions on the DVDlab forum since Oscar is near another release (upgrade) that said. DVDlab allows you to use some file types that are not to DVD specs but as I use m2v and ac3 files only DVDlab puts mine to spec as far as I know. I use the program with great sucess. It does everything I need it to do and will do more with the next release. I wll know that other folks here don't like it, but what the heck.

I honestly think it is Final Cut Pro PLUS for the PC. THE Final Cut Pro killer.

While I've been involved in those PC vs. Mac debates in the past, the more I think about it, the more I find that there really is no point to choosing sides. Of course the marketting guys (for both sides) want there to be a war, because whoever "wins", or has the "better" system, will get more sales by way of the uneducated. However, it's quite clear that both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. While the marketting guys would have you believe it, a new processor will never be the end-all solution to all your problems. Oddly enough, a newer and faster processor will always come out :)

As for the FCP vs. Vegas issue, I think it is important to choose sides. The reason being is that they are not interoperable, and thus workflow will be worsened if you have two different competing systems to work between. Also, they both have a fairly different workflow. The first NLE I used was FCP, and I loved it. Being a v1 product at the time, there were a fair amount of issues, most of which have been ironed out by now. Nontheless, it was a very simple system to use.

Vegas is also a very robust NLE that is very fun to work with. Though it follows a different workflow, I find it very intuitive.

Both NLEs are great. For myself, in my workflow, the two most important aspects in an NLE are media management and the editing workflow. Vegas definitely wins out in the editing workflow. It's sort of hard to explain, but Vegas just feels so much more fluid when working with clips in the timeline. You can loop through a section and adjust effects, levels, etc. of any clip and the feedback is very good. FCP wins hands-down IMO in the media management arena. It has better support for bins, color-coding media, subclips, offline capture, etc. Definitely, the ability to have multiple sequences is something that I definitely miss as my Vegas projects are increasing in size (and thus scenes). It gets much more difficult to manage all your media in Vegas when working on multi-scene projects (like feature-length films or sitcom type shows). I know that in the past, the dev team expressed that they didn't see why someone would want to have multiple sequences in one project as opposed to a separate project files for each scene (as I lobbied for this a lot when I first migrated over from FCP), but I hope that its usefulness has become clear by now.

All in all, both systems are very good, and you're going to have to make compromises on each. I would go with Vegas for many reasons, not least of which because it's cheaper and I build my own PCs. However, just because it's cheaper doesn't mean that Vegas and the PC should be considered the "Poor man's NLE system" in the sense that you get less for paying less. In fact, while you may pay less, you are getting much much more in many respects.

Thanks for the info, donp326. A question for you: Can you build a menu in DVDLab that allows the eventual viewer to navigate to a menu item (say scene 13-18) and upon navigating to that item those scene thumbnails are automatically displayed, without the viewer having to hit "enter" on their remote to go to them?

2Road, all my DVD author's have at least one chapter menue. You can navigate to the chapter menue highlight the scene selection you want hit enter on that to go to the chapter thast begins with the scene. My scene selection thumnails are all linked but the titles underneath are not.
If you mean automatically displayed like in the Lord of the Rings Two Towers where as you pass through the scene selections motion thumnails of the beginning of the selected section appears? No I havn't mastered that yet and do niot know if DVDlab can do it either. I cannot definately say that it won't.