Apple announced it last month, but DVD Studio Pro has pretty much gotten lost in the shuffle of other announcements. But it shouldn’t as it offers “access to the full range of what can be done with DVD authoring,” Mike Evangelist, Apple spokesperson, told MacCentral.
“DVD Studio Pro is a more sophisticated environment,” Evangelist said. “But it’s still aimed at those who need to produce professional DVDs, but don’t have time to learn very complex applications. The typical video person can learn to use DVD Studio Pro in a few hours.”
The high-end application offers such features as the ability to do motion-based menus rather than still image menus, as is done in its little cousin. It also offers multiple angles for single video tracks, allowing a viewer to choose among parallel tracks of video. DVD Studio Pro makes it possible to combine up to nine parallel tracks of video and eight audio tracks. The multiple audio tracks facilitate “director’s comments,” a variety of languages, and more.
DVD Studio Pro is actually several applications, in one, Evangelist said. It contains an MPEG encoding component, a full Dolby encoder, a subtitled editing application, and the authoring environment itself.
The application is object oriented to make the user interface as easy as possible, Evangelist said. It offers a full preview of your work before it’s saved or burned to DVD.
DVD Studio Pro works with Apple’s new SuperDrive (currently available only on the Power Mac G4/733 model), as well as various third party drives. The standard iDVD app only works with the SuperDrive.
The pro application lets you burn DVD-RAM disks and DLT tapes. The latter is typically used when planning DVD projects that will be replicated on several disks. In fact, taking advantage of the latter capability means you can burn a 9 GB disk if you’re taking your work to a pressing plant, Evangelist said.
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