| |
|
Sonic's DVDit 5.2
Introduction
You should know by now that we are video fanatics. We recently
reviewed Sony Vegas
for creating video and
SWiSHvideo for presenting it on the Web. Now it's time
to review a product for taking your video creation and putting
it on a DVD so that you can cherish it for years to come.
In the past, we've used Sony's DVD Architect (an excellent
product, but Sony was not able to provide us with a review copy
due to Dolby licensing restrictions), Ulead's DVD Workshop, and several
consumer-level tools. We had never used Sonic's DVDit
prior to this review, and we must say that we weren't expecting
much. We had heard some less-than-stellar comments about
past versions. Wow, were we pleasantly surprised! DVDit has come back with a vengeance, and has surpassed its competition in many areas.
The Interface
DVDit's interface is clean and easy to work with. As with
other DVD authoring applications, Sonic has opted for the tabbed
dialog approach. There's a reason why this approach is so
popular in DVD authoring software; it's effective and obfuscates
some of the complexity. In other words, if you're not
working on setting chapter points in a piece of video, why show
any controls or options for chapter points?
The main interface is broken up into four distinct screens;
Projects, Edit, Author, and Finish.
As we usually do in our reviews, we're going to take you through
each one of these screen individually with the exception of the
Projects screen. We're leaving the Projects screen out of
the review because it's simply where you create and open
projects and we don't want to take up valuable time going over
that part of the process.
|