Fear and loathing in authoring land, or….

[bunkyv]

How I learned to love Studio 8

First let me say a big thanks to LordSmurf and the other posters on here, found this site about 4 weeks ago, and without your guides I would not have finished my first VCR to DVD project, great help to say the least. So on to my question with a brief tale of my journey so skip the next paragraph if you are bored by ramblings.

I have no idea how any human being of normal intelligence could possibly author a DVD with any transitions or music without having this site to go to for help. This is coming from a guy who makes his living installing and training on software packages, what a mess these things are primarily studio 8. The only thing that went smooth after one aborted attempt (thanks again lord smurf) was the capture from VCR using my AIW 9800 pro. So after that it was off to make some magic in Studio 8 and my 14 hour journey to make a 25 minute DVD started. The actual adding of music/ transitions/ adjusting audio/ and adding pictures was a snap in Studio 8, and if not for the bugs would be a wonderful program. But there is the rub, this program must have crashed 10 times, tried using mpeg2 first with success but the program would lock up doing anything with adding music, so then tried avi files first file came in great, then tried to add another avi file and boom went down the tubes again. Loaded the latest update for Studio 8, back to the mpeg, and wonder of wonder it all worked, with the occasional crash. Then found out through pinnacle’s web site forums that for some people, lucky me included, you cant create the vob file with Mpeg files. The bad thing about this is that they have been posting about this for two months and have not received an answer yet. So that’s when DVD lab came into play, I just created a new mpeg in studio 8 of the main movie then went to DVD lab (thanks again for the tutorials) imported the mpeg created the menus and without problem turned out a DVD.

OK my question, I am primarily going to be taking about 20 hours of VCR tape and transferring it over to DVD as just an auto start play, along with maybe 6 projects where I will want to add music where I can preview sound so that I know when to adjust the music down and the audio from the mpeg up. On these projects I also want to have transitions, add pictures and create menus with chapters. Basically I want the functionality of Studio 8 without the bugs. I liked DVD Lab, but from what I researched you can not preview sound, and I did not see an option to add extra sound files to the project (I do love the menu setup in this package).

I have read the other threads on this and they really did not touch exactly on what I am looking for. I hate being the newbie and cluttering up the forums on something that has already been discussed so if someone had a similar post maybe you could point me to it.

Thanks

Mark

[bunkyv]

I hate bumping my own thread, but has anybody else found a package that had the above needed features?