Logical next step up from DVD Movie Factory?

[miamicanes]

OK, I'll admit it... I like DVD Movie Factory. It generaly does a good job, is fairly easy to use, and generally works well. But I'm starting to chafe a bit at its limits. Specifically, it looks like it can't be used to author discs with some tracks that have 540i50 and some tracks with 480i60. It seems that it can accept both, but forces the author to make up his mind whether he wants them all converted to one or the other.

I guess the next logical candidate is TMPGEnc DVD author... but I know there are others that might fit the bill better. Mabe Ulead DVD Workshop (though the general impression I've gotten is that comparing DMF with DVDW is like comparing Outlook Express 5 with Outlook 2000... technically, the latter was a step up, but the former had lots of capabilities that the latter simply lacked and in many ways).

I played with DVDLab a bit, but was a bit turned off by its apparent awkward handling of motion menus. I'd kind of hoped for a program that allowed easy template usage, but let you treat templates like starting points that could be overridden when the need arose. Perhaps a future version will be able to interface directly with TMPGEnc's baby brother -- acting as the primary user interface, but quietly using T's rendering engine behind the scenes when necessary.

What capabilities do I explicitly need?

* author disc with both 540i50 and 480i60 content, left at its native rez/fieldrate

* easy to lay out menus like DMF3, but capable of things like moving scene icons around, adding/removing scene icons, etc. Support for custom menus with arbitrary backgrounds (ideally, supporting MPEG as well as JPEG), selected/not-selected icon frames (imported as a pair of GIF images with transparent region where the movie ought to go), etc.

* automatic generation of motion icons (preferably, enabling the user to choose start and end points of the loop, rather than blindly using the first n seconds of the clip)

* ability to render truncated (from start and/or end) subset of longer MPEG-2 clip authored with MPEG-2, AC3, and/or PCM audio... ideally, capable of leaving AC3 intact, but rendering PCM to one of the other compressed formats.

* smart enough to leave render-able files intact, truncating them on an I-frame boundary where appropriate, but otherwise leaving them alone and refraining from re-rendering them needlessly.

[bugster]

* author disc with both 540i50 and 480i60 content, left at its native rez/fieldrate

You mean mix PAL and NTSC type videos on one DVD? If so you need an authoring package that will produce multiple titlesets. Video types can be mixed but each must be in its own titleset.

I believe TmpGenc DVD Author will produce multiple titlesetset but I can't confirm if it will accept both PAL and NTSC videos in one project. The New DVD-Lab Pro will produce multiple titlesets too but other than that I don't know what its capabilities are, probably just a step up on the original DVD-Lab.

[masterpug0]

totally agree with comment about dvd-lab motion thumbnail not easy compared to dmf3, but it has the advantage of being able to move thumbnails around to any position and resize them vs dmf3 and sonic mydvd with are fixed in place and not resizable. almost there ulead...just a little more flexibility and there will be very little it won't do just fine.