For what it's worth - you have my sympathy. I can understand why SoFo wants a registration scheme, but it's clearly not transparent, and it doesn't work.

Strange that this should be the same company that is famed for its user-interface.

Mark

BillyBoy,
Reading all this crap has caused me to leave my "bag" untouched since it arrived.
Now I am seriously considering asking for a refund, especially since DVDA doesn't seem to work yet the Ulead DVD MovieFactory that you recommended to me for $48 works flawlessly.
Anyone who tells you that you should take it in stride and just "have fun" has some serious functional problems. No slander intended.

John

Mainly for Craftech, you may want to open the bag anyways. DVDA has some rough edges, but I tend to push all applications I use to the limit and maybe I expect too much. I finally got to burn a DVD and it worked fine. I'm sorry if I blow my stack once in awhile, (this is maybe the third time in about two years) but as I've said a few times in the Vegas forum, I'm a nitpicker. Look in a dictionary under that word you'll see my picture.

Aside from the excessive registraton process which I've ranted on before which is REALLY stupid, some of the problems I addressed supposedly are addressed in a new release that should be released next week. So we'll see.

So far the know issues I've seen are:

1. to make the thumbnails for a sub menu you first need to set chapter points in the source file. You can do that easy enough from within DVDA, but being spoiled with the controls you have in Vegas it is a royal pain in the butt. There is no scrubber bar do going to a PRECISE frame is difficult unless you already know the timeline reference which you won't unless you marked them down or already have markers in the rendered file you did in Vegas. That's fine for going forward, but if you're like me and have been waiting for DVDA and have already made a bunch of rendered files in Vegas this is a BIG pain. In can be done, but it takes either opening the file back up in Vegas to get a precise reference which you then can type in or using the preview mode and writing down from there.

2. Apparently there is a serious bug that prevents your DVD remote control from using the normal top menu and sub menu controls. Someone suggest trimming the last second of each video and then if you start the DVD to play from any chapter point it will return to the sub menu. Otherwise it is "broken" and returns to the top menu. This is the thing that really ticked me off because its a STUPID programming error SoFo should have caught and if not for sure the Beta testers if they knew what they were doing. Obviously then didn't. That's my personal opinion. But remember I was a beta tester for three of the biggest, IBM Adobe and Microsoft. I know sloppy when I see it. The main problem with this issue is the number of times you have to make a fix. In my test project I had set up 50 chapters for the various videos I had on this first DVD. That means I had to physically go to each thumnail, click a couple buttons, reset the ending frame reducing it by a second. Not only is this a royal pain, it means you screw up the ending of each of your videos if you fade to black, since you're cutting a full second off it shows. I did some limited testing off my DVD player and so far at least this fix (cutting off the last second) allows the DVD remote to properly function and return to the originating sub menu and not go goofy and wrongly return to the top menu.

3. The manual sucks. Sorry, but it does. Compared to the high quality and loads of illustrations Vegas has, this one is a bow wow. Online help isn't much better. If people are new to burning DVD's they will be cursing this application because you are given scant help in a lot of key areas leaving you to guess or go the trail and error route. That's didn't make me that happy either.

4. If you reuse the same file for background music it bumps the meter that shows disc useage everyt time you use the file. Use the same file ten times it counts it ten times. The file doesn't get duplicated on the actual disk, but this means you got to drag out the pencil and paper to keep track, worse DVDA will show you're over the allowed limit and while I don't know for a fact, they may force a recompression you don't really need. Again, in my opinion this was a careless mistake in programming, and again points to nobody REALLY testing the application, because this kind of things jumps right out at you.

5. The Optimize function, is totally messed up. It reports files you've deleted, again distorting what it says in the way of errors. The problem is you end up not trusting what the application tells you. That too is bad form.

The good things are you have much finer control over where the thumbnails can go, the size, type of fonts for text, other eye candy stuff compared to the first version of DVD Movie Factory DVDA does that much better and you can have more thumbnails on a page and nudge them a little along with having snap to grids, that kind of stuff. A couple other nice features are you can have all the thumbnails easily animated. I have five on the main page and decided not to animate the sub menu pages, but you can if you want to. Also you can select what part of the video is used and loop it very easily. Those are nice features. As far as A3-C what I tried it was a pain, and horrible quality. I only tried one files, so who knows.

I read as far as the first para, then realized this one was a novel. For first para...
DVDA DOES have a scrubber bar, just click in the editing window (same place you insert chapter points) and scrub. Stop scrubbing on the frame you want, and press "T" to insert that frame as a thumbnail pic in the menu button that the video is assigned to, or to set the first frame of an animated menu button.

First, the registration is different for EVERY computer so it is no surprise that you must register the other computer. However, it is nowhere as complicated as you are making it. All of my editing computers are NOT connected to the internet so here is how I register them:

1. Choose Over the internet via ANOTHER COMPUTER
2. Copy the generated HTML file to a computer with an internet connection
3. Load that HTML page in the browser and follow the prompts
4. Wait a few seconds to receive the e-mail containing the .REG file
5. Run the .REG file on the editing computer.

All done in a matter of minutes with NO TYPING of serial numbers (no matter how long or short)

BillyBoy: I have read your many frustrating posts with regards to DVDa and feel that I must at this point present the 'other side of the story'. I am not as experinced a video editer as you, (I loved your Vegas 4 tutorials), but I have had no, (0), problems with DVDa. I have DVDit PE, ReelDVD, and DVDWS. Contrary to your experience, I have found DVDa the easiest to work with, the most user friendly, and I have produced a number of high quality technically sophisticated DVD's. It's not a perfect program, but certainly your exasperation is not the norm. Your level of frustration sounds like your getting to the breaking point. (like when a car begins to go bad on you). Perhaps a 'therapeutic break' and time for contemplation would allow you to see the 'promise' in this immature, but nevertheless great, product.

JTH

Well guess what Jet, I did that over five hours ago and STILL no email. So that means my second machine it still nagging for me to register. Some of us WORK on the weekend. Lot of us, but apparently SoFo doesn't and they haven't automated the registration process where a registration key or whatever could be generated automatically so again, I'm sitting here cooling my heels waiting.

And sorry bub, you're skipping steps. If you use the register on another computer method the floppy you're asked to make does NOT contain all the information the registration proceed needs. Read what I said again. Carefully.

A question, why are you so defensive of SoFo? I'm supportive when they do something right, but clearly their registraton method is crude. Again I remind you I just went through this hassle a few days ago. Why isn't the registration method smart enough to REGISTER everything at one time instead of waiting till you use a specific feature, then nag you for it. This is another reason SoFo isn't see as very "professional", they keep using a mickey mouse registration scheme they KNOW is broken IF you try to register off-line.

My frustration is due in part I was trying to finish a project I promised. When I give my word and say something will be ready at such and such time it is. When you run into one roadblock after another and on top of having to fool around with stupid registration schemes AFTER you already did all that a couple days before you get angry. At least I do. I'm only human.

Some may consider my short series of posts 'rants' that's you choice. I look at them more as a warning to others also under deadline to take notice you may not want to go this route right now. I'm still a big fan of Vegas. However I stand by what I said about DVDA, it wasn't ready for release. That is CONFIMED by SoFo now rushing a fix for all the bugs that had no business being there. Shades of Microsoft.

Thanks SPOT. So we have an INVISIBLE scrubber unlike in Vegas that has a huge bar you can drag. Actually that's a tad of an overstatement. There is a thin (looks like one pixel wide line) that by default sits against the left end of the timeline. Wow, how could I have missed that? A thin grayist one pixel wide vertical line. At higher resolutions it is nearly invisible.

Oh that's cute. Also no mention of scrubber in the manual or online help nor under timeline or ANYTHING for that matter that I can find. So you can click anywhere on the timeline and while holding down the mouse drag. Fine, but is that "feature" EXPLAINED anywhere? No.

Much worse from my point of view when you start to play it goes to a whole new window and the timeline disappears. again totally unlike Vegas. I would have thought that since everyone raves about the Vegas interface including me, they would have pretty much stuck with something similar.

I could list lots of things that are 'different' but don't want to step on any more toes. I got a thick skin, obviously some here don't. No, not you SPOT, others. <wink>

Well....regarding the differences, the DVDA interface was carved out by the boyz in Canada, and they have a decidedly different approach. I'll absolutely grant you the manual isn't much for looking at, which is why I spent quite a bit of time with DVDA in my book, and yet after my book was turned in, DVDA changed. But that's sorta normal.
DVDA is a first outing for SOFO, so I'm willing to deal with some of the 'wish I hads' in there. Remember, I started with Vegas before it was even 1.0 with an alpha. You wanna know about FRUSTRATING!? :-)
I don't know about the registration issue, even though I don't ever do the net on my editing machines, they are indeed networked to the main server, so I can always register. I also often have to email stuff to a client, so I will render to shared files on the storage drives, so I can access it via my main mail/daily use box. So I can't really comment on what you might be having trouble with. However, if I can try to help find stuff in DVDA, I'm happy to do so. I think part of the manual problem was getting DVDA out there at the same time as V4. I had a beta of DVDA long before I had a beta of V4....but the changes between builds of DVDA were far more significant. I'm one of the beta testers you keep bitc#$R! about. :-)
But I'm fairly thick-skinned.