Paul,

People will commonly advise you not to buy version 1.0 of anything, and that is pretty good advice. In my case I sprung for the extra bucks to get DVD-A because I wanted to get on the upgrade path. It's kind of a gamble, but I think that version 2 of DVD-A just might be pretty good. And a lot of people are happy with version 1. I didn't have high expectations because it is version 1 and it was developed on a very accelerated time schedule.

-- Seeker --

I can only add my vote to what's already been said. DVDA does a reasonable job. Its pretty hard to make a coaster with it.

Certainly it's only one level up from the very basic stuff, but it does add MPEG2 and AC3 capability to VV, woth it alone for that to some of us.

Thanks for the feedback. I think I will stick with MyDVD for now.

I have had a chance to use Vegas through a friend of mine and found it very user-friendly. I can't wait to get my own copy. My main purpose will be to edit the multitude of VHS tapes I have accumulated. I recently bought a Sony mini-DV camera too so I'll be able to edit my new videos as well as convert my old VHS tapes with the analog-to-digital converter that is built in.

DVD-A is almost a great application, but it has some really basic flaws that make it almost unusable at times.

It doesn't let you take footage that you've already put on DVD and easily re-use it later.

It cannot handle multiple MPEG files as one project which means that, if you want to create a DVD that can play end-to-end without revisiting the menu, you will have to render your entire project all at once into one big MPEG file, or find an application (like Womble's MPEG VCR) that can combine exisiting MPEG files. This missing functionality makes DVD-A almost unusable. I mean, who creates a two hour project all in one big project file? And, now that DVD has become the main delivery and archive media, why can't I re-use the video and combine it with new proejcts?

Also, DVD-A requires that you render the audio and video separately in Vegas, something Vegas does not do without a script. If you don't feel comfortable with scripts, or don't know where to get the script to render the audio and video in one command, then you have to babysit the machine until the first render is complete (I do the audio first), and then start the video. Who wants to sit around waiting for a render to finish?

DVD-A handles AC-3, which is the really good news, but it doesn't handle other forms of audio which means it must needlessly re-render perfectly valid MPEG-2 files obtained from other sources. Most MPEG-2 files created by other applications do not use the more professional AC-3 encoding.

DVD-A provides no links back to Vegas to help you estimate how much will fit on a DVD at various encoding rates. Unless you know how to use a bitrate calculator (which you have to find at VCDhelp or some other place), you are shooting in the dark when you encode in Vegas. You can avoid this problem by rendering to an AVI file from Vegas and then instead encoding to MPEG in DVD-A, but as the SOFO rep pointed out in these forums some months back, this forces you re-render every time you make a change in DVD-A (several hours each time). I should also point out that the size estimates that DVD-A makes are wildly incorrect -- whoever created the estimator for DVD-A really blew it. Thus, even with this less than optimal workflow, you are still shooting in the dark if you are trying to get the highest possible encoding rate that will come as close to exactly fitting your video on a DVD+-R. You HAVE to do this in order to get the best possible quality.

If you put chapter points in Vegas, they are carried over to DVD-A. That is the good news. The bad news is that if you want your main menu to have these chapters, you can't do it directly. Instead, you drag the file created by Vegas onto the screen. This creates a single icon for the entire movie. You then right-click and ask it to insert a submenu. You then delete the first icon, because when you insert a submenu you get a submenu icon on the main page (unless you want one icon to play the movie and another icon to take you to another page where you select the chapters). If you want to get all the chapter icons that are created on another page and move them to the first page where you really want them, it gets too complicated to talk about here.

I could go on, but this is beginning to sound like a rant, and that wasn't my intent. I had Sonic MyDVD and it was horrible. I bought Ulead Moviefactory2 and it was better. DVD-A is better in some respects to Moviefactory2, but worse in many others. However, given the almost 10:1 price difference, it ought to be better in every respect, and it isn't, which is why I am sorely disappointed.

Finally, Sound Forge and Vegas (and VideoFactory) are such MARVELOUS applications. By contrast, DVD Architect just isn't in the same league -- it's not even close. However, the basic architecture is quite good, and the workflow is very nice. If the DVD-A engineers have been listening really well, and if they have taken the time to understand how people really use these prorams, and if they have been watching to get a sense of the market direction, then I agree with other posters that version 2.0 could be a very good product.

I will check out MF2. As someone else pointed out earlier in this thread it is a good policy to avoid v 1.0 of almost any software. I'm sure the SoFo people realize that DVD-A has many flaws and will no doubt make the necessary improvements.