DVD authoring with DVDit!

If you recently have bought a DVD burner, you probably did get it bundled with a DVD authoring program. Most burners are sold with MyDVD from Sonic Solutions. A review of the Philips burner including MyDVD is published elsewhere on this site: Review of the Philips DVDRW208K.

Because the DVD authoring possibilities of MyDVD are somewhat limited, you might be interested in a more comprehensive package to create DVD's. One of the available choices is DVDit! also from Sonic Solutions. This article is not meant as a manual, but is meant to give a good impression of what you can do and how this is done in DVDit!.

Scope of the program
DVDit! versions
Getting started
The DVDit! GUI
Organization of data
Importing content
Creating menu structures
Chapters
Encoding features
Burning the DVD
Support
Conclusions

1. Scope of the program

The scope of DVDit! is encoding, DVD authoring and burning. One of the main differences between MyDVD and DVDit! is that with MyDVD you can capture video which you cannot with DVDit!. For the vast majority of users this will probably not an issue, because they in most cases they will want to edit their movies anyway and almost all editing programs can be used for capturing the source material.

2. DVDit! versions

DVDit! comes in several versions. There is a LE and a PE version. Main differences between these two are that the SE version is limited to 10 menus, 4:3 aspect ratio and does not support Dolby Digital audio. An extra feature in the PE version is that you can write DVD Masters on digital linear tape, for mass reproduction of DVD's.

For owners of a DVD+RW drive: make sure that you buy version 2.5. The earlier version 2.3 does not support DVD+RW drives!

The version reviewed in this article is DVDit! PE version 2.5.

3. Getting started

Before starting DVDit! you will have to make sure that your screen settings are not less than 1024x768. If you try to start it with 800x600 a window pops up telling you that you will have to change your screen settings.

After starting up the program first asks the user to make a selections regarding:

PAL or NTSC standard
16:9 or 4:3 format
file types to be accepted

Once you have answered these questions you are ready to go.

4. The DVDit! GUI

The user interface of DVDit! is straightforward and works very intuitive. Of course the package contains a extended manual and also a Tutorial on a separate CD-ROM. Like many users I don't like reading manuals or going through Tutorials and I was perfectly able to work with DVDit! without doing any of that.

The main GUI of DVDit! consists of four sections.

A Themes section containing the data elements that you want to use in the DVD. The section is divided in four areas one of each for backgrounds, buttons, text and media files.
A Menus/Movies section where the menus and movies that will be placed on the DVD are defined.
A Menu bar at the top of the screen with a number of pull down menu's.
The Video Monitor where the result of the authoring process is displayed.

5. Organization of data

All content data in DVDit! is organized in so-called Themes. The standard package is supplied with a couple of themes with a number of backgrounds and buttons. More themes are available for a purchase from Sonic Solutions, but you can also create your own themes or expand existing ones by adding your own backgrounds and buttons. Besides backgrounds and buttons also video and audio files that you want to use for your production are placed in these Themes. If you work from within DVDit! itself, adding media files in a Theme does not copy the file but just creates a link to the file on the hard drive.

Themes are not project specific but once defined they will be accessible every time you start DVDit!. Advantage is that, if you start a new project, the files that you used in other projects are still available for the new project. However, if you delete media file from your system that you no longer require without deleting the Theme or the links, you will get a message that the file cannot be found, giving you the choice to delete the link or just skip it.

6. Importing content

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