For a bundled add-on, DVDit! offers powerful functionality. Even going up against some competitors' products, retailing for several hundred dollars, it comes out on top. Before giving you some specifics, here's a rundown on just who those competitors are. The universe of DVD-authoring software firms is very limited. These days, Sonic Solutions (www.sonic.com), the makers of DVDit!, absolutely dominates the industry. Until 1999, about a half- dozen companies created DVD-authoring software and charged thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, for their products. That's when Sonic , primarily an audio production software and hardware developer, introduced DVDit! for $500. Consolidation quickly followed. Sonic purchased the rights to Daikin's Scenarist DVD-authoring tool, and Apple bought two DVD developers, Spruce and Astarte, and soon began shipping DVD Studio Pro for the Mac. The only other " name " players currently offering prosumer -level products are Ulead Systems, with its DVD Workshop, and Pinnacle Systems, which entered the DVD-authoring market by buying Minerva's Impression DVD-Pro authoring software. Your bundled, free copy of DVDit! LE offers several more features than the $300 Ulead DVD Workshop and is nearly as feature rich as the $600 Impression DVD-Pro. In either case, DVDit! stands out from this prosumer crowd because of the following extra characteristics:
You may never need any more than DVDit! has to offer. But if you want to incorporate into your projects some of the elements I listed at the beginning of this hour , you'll need to spend some money. You can take one of three routes to step up from DVDit! LE:
Sonic offers two retail versions of DVDit! SE and PE. When we went to press, the SE upgrade from LE was $200 and the PE version was $500. SE offers these additional features:
PE is geared more to higher-end productions . It has all the SE features plus the following:
Pinnacle Impression DVD-Pro (www.pinnaclesys.com) lists for $600. It has a couple features missing in DVDit! PE but lacks quite a few more. Here are the elements it has that DVDit! PE doesn't:
On the other hand, DVDit! SE and PE's menu and button properties and DVD-ROM features outshine Impression DVD-Pro. Mac owners with Apple's bundled, consumer-level DVD authoring product iDVD can turn to two mid-range authoring products: Apple's DVD Studio Pro (www.apple.com) and Sonic's DVD Fusion. The minimum platform that can accommodate these products is an 800 MHz iMac ($1,900) or a 933 MHz Power Mac G4 ($2,300). On a feature-to-feature comparison, DVD Studio Pro and DVD Fusion are in a virtual dead heat. They offer the same number of audio tracks, subtitle tracks, camera angles, and support for DVD-5 and DVD-9.
What may give DVD Fusion an edge over DVD Studio Pro is price ($800 versus $1,000), a timeline interface that will seem very familiar to Premiere users, and full DVD interactivity options.
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