Best DVD authoring program with Motion Menus and AC3 sound?

[burdell1]

What is the best DVD authoring software (that is relatively cheap) that has animated menus and is capable of outputing in AC3 (or Dolby Digital) Sound? I'm mostly interested in the animated menus though.

[thxkid]

as far as I can find nothing so far supports ac3 or VOB's with ac3, tried Spruceup, Uleads movie factory, have not tried DVDit or ReelDVD, have both programs so be interested in knowing if either one of these will.

[bugster]

Animated Menus:

Ulead DVD Workshop (Auto generates them)
Dazzle DVD complete (See above)
DVD Maestro (Make your own animations)
Reel DVD (as above)
And there must be others, the 1st 2 are reasonably cheep.

AC3 support.

Reel DVD has a built in 2-chan Ac3 encoder (may do 5.1 too, don't know). Sonic DVDit PE has a built in 2-chan Ac3 encoder 2.

Spruce up will accept pre-encoded AC3, As will DVD workshop if it is multiplexed with the video file.

Hope this helps.

[Faceman101]

Pinnacle Impression DVD Pro also supports AC3 and motion menus.

bugster what do you mean by Ulead DVD Workshop and Dazzle DVD Complete auto generating your motion menus?

[bugster]

bugster what do you mean by Ulead DVD Workshop and Dazzle DVD Complete auto generating your motion menus?

For your chapter menu's, they will automatically render moving thumbnails for each chapter. This is a miniture pic of the movie at the chapter point and you can set the length to a certain extent, then it loops back and plays again.

[Faceman101]

So you can't import a motion menu of your own?

[bugster]

So you can't import a motion menu of your own?

Not sure on this one but I don't think so.