Newbie needs help on choosing the right authering products

[lars-bo]

Ok, I am a newbie to DVD authoring, just bought my Teach drive this Friday. I burned my first DVD with Ulead DVD movie factory and I am amassed about the quality that I am getting on my standalone dvd plyer compared to SVCD. But now I want to do better and hence I am looking for advice on DVD authoring.

Some background on my setup – I capture from my JVC camera through a fire-wire connection into Pinnacle studio, I do the editing and saves the job in an avi file using the DV codec, then I use TmpgEnc with the DVD template to convert into a mpg movie file and the sound goes into a wav file.

As I mentioned it works fine in Movie factory – but I want more control over the menu structure than movie factory seems to give. I would like to have an intro video leading to a main menu with a background picture and two buttons placed - where I want them. One button should take me to a video menu with a button for each movie clip leading to a chapter menu for each clip. The other button on the main menu should take me to a picture menu with several slideshows. Something like:

Main
Movie Picture
Chap1 ChapNN Slide1 SlideNN


Movie factory does not seem to give this freedom, so I have been looking around for something else, DVDit seem to supply this freedom, but the screen is just black when I try to play back the video clips (sound is ok) this means I can not insert the chapterpoints. Btw DVDit does show the first frame of each clip in the icon representing the movie clips and the movie clips does play ok in PowerDVD and Win DVD.

I then tried Ulead Movie Workshop, but here it seem that I can’t import the wav sound files for my movie clip.

So right now I am pretty frustrated on my lack of progress and I hope some of you could guide me to a product that will do the job or how to fix the problem I have with DVDit since it seems that it should potentially do the job in a user-friendly way.

Regards

Lars-Bo

[Quigonsean]

Beside Maestro, I use Ulead DVD Workshop for simpler authoring, and it does all that. Just to be a PIA I always put a FBI Warning clip as first play so when someone puts in a disc I made their stuck watching an FBI warning for 30 seconds or so I don't remember exactly how long the clip is I use. "Ain't I a stinker" But DVDWS is great you link just by dragging a clip to a button or text and it automatically links to that for ya, easy peasy. You get chapter breaks do it yourself, or template based menus. It supports nested menus like you want. I really dig it.

Sean