Chapter 12. DVD Authoring

The problem with linear video is that it's so, well, linear. While it can seemingly take forever to create a 30-minute video from your four hours of vacation tapes, you still might have trouble quickly locating that cute spot where little Sally and cousin Johnny were holding hands, watching the 4^th of July parade.

That's the beauty of DVD. It's pretty much infinitely linkable, allowing you to find the most important scenes quickly. And, though you can dress up your videos as much as you like, you can also choose to break them into scenes (or let scene detection do the work for you) and create menus with links to the good parts.

It's a parent's dream: simple, fast, and better-than-VHS quality, with tape-like playback simplicity. Just open the player and pop in the disc. With recordable drive and media prices dropping every time you turn around, it's also alluringly inexpensive.

Whereas Springsteen was "born to run," Studio was born to author DVDs, the first program ever to offer an integrated editing and authoring environment. It's enough to get my creative juices flowing how 'bout yours?