Professional wedding dvd authoring??

AAside from Toast there are three now EOL software items on the Mac, iDVD, DVD Studio Pro, and Adobe Encoré.

Andy9761 wrote:

adobe encore cs6 appears to be no longer available.

Encore is available if you buy a subscription to Premiere Creative Cloud. (Lots of people agree with you about not having a modern version of DVD SP. BTW, Adobe is no longer developing Encore either – so it''s not just Apple that has moved away from disks.)

DVD SP is only available by purchasing the entire FCS suite – available from some online retailers – but a big commitment for discontinued software – particularly if you only want disk authoring. iDVD is a much better value if you can find it.

You could also take a look at Roxio Toast, which Tom suggested first.

Russ

I find iDVD to be the best. Readily available on Amazon as part of iLife 09 or iLife 11.

Actually, they're both dead. They just haven't fallen down yet...

What happened was Blue Ray... and numerous problems with DRM (digital rights management) and the squabbling between just about every Japanese electronics company you can think of...

Steve Jobs said: Blue Ray is just a bag of hurt. (He wasn't too happy with HDMI either!) He had enough and killed development—all of it. New Macs don't even have the DVD drive anymore and there will never be a BD drive. The way technology is progressing, it is my opinion that BD and DVD will not survive. You can get a better, more superior quality with smaller file sizes and players like Roku, etc. and Apple TV etc. (I have a cheap "IncrediSonic" player and the quality of 640x360 h.264 videos is easily on par with DVD quality on an HD tv set [or better].)

I was keeping up to date with DVDSP and the last version I have is 4.2.2. If you require DVD authoring, it may help you if you have an older Mac running Snow Leopard (which was the version of OSX on my 2009 iMac when I bought Final Cut Studio 3) up to about Mountain Lion to run DVDSP on. I've read that DVDSP runs "fine" under Yosemite, but I cannot personally confirm that for you (I can open it, but I haven't put it through its "paces" in years.)

You can do "real authoring" DVD Studio Pro. DVD Studio Pro is about the only software package for Mac that I know of that allows you to actually "program" the disc with instructions (like many commercially created DVDs — animated menus, hidden layers, etc..) Everything you've ever seen a DVD do, you can create in DVDSP. If you have Motion 4, you can import motion projects into DVDSP for use in creating DVD menus and such. It is a very complete development app for the media. I was happy to have it — except — I never could equal the render quality with a 1 hour DVDSP created disc that I could get from my Panasonic set top DVD recorder (recording tv shows) even at 4 hours of programming per disc. (Panasonic's DVD quality with upsampling was "who needs blu-ray" — literally.)

I bought FCP Studio 3 mainly for DVDSP (4 years ago now...) I haven't used it (DVDSP) in at least 3 years now. You have to ask yourself "Is it worth it?" Both Apple and Adobe have abandoned DVD (and Blue-ray). Commercial DVDs/BDs are still being made, but you can't even get a decent price on a set top recorder anymore — they're becoming "rare" (Panasonic has stopped development of those boxes, and they were the best.) All of these companies have read the handwriting on the wall, so to speak (or they're the ones writing it!) You can do better with an 8GB SD card (and the right player) media-wise, than you can with DVD...or BD for that matter. [Also consider what effect UltraHD/4K/5K and up(?) will have as time goes on. More nails in the DVD/BD disc coffin.]

In the meantime, iDVD should not watermark your media... I have no idea what is up with that. It's easier to learn and use, shouldn't cost very much and you won't feel as bad when you ultimately abandon it. And it's better than Toast.

IiDVD adds an Apple watermark by default, but you can switch it off in preferences.

Ah... so it does... lol. (I don't use iMovie either.)

Ther's nothing wrong with Apple's olde DVD Studio Pro v4+. The interface might be clunky but the output is as fine as whatever you give it to encode and how well you know how to use it. You have access to hihgly advanced fu,nctions like easter eggs, branching, button tracking, GRMS and SPMR logging and script execution. Most DVDSP never even touch the cooler capabilities of DVDSP. It's a weirdly unreasonable bummer that Apple has killed this superb, if clunky, application.

If you really need advanced DVD authoring capabilities, beyond simple menus, then you want to find an older Macintosh running an older OS and you want to buy a copy of Final Cut Studio. But "professional wedding authoring" is relative. There are event shooters who use Toast to deliver their products. I don't know anything about Winderz apps but a cheap laptop and an inexpensive app might be all you need to satisfy your customers' expectations. What are your peers using these days? There are associations of event and wedding shooters of which you may be a member.

It seems like others may have had different experiences recently, but my experience with both DVDSP & Adobe Encore is that neither one worked under Mavericks. They would open and I could author something but they would crash either before I was done authoring or without being able to fully export a project (it was a year ago, so I don't remember for sure). These were consistent, reproducible issues so I had to abandon them (DVDSP regretfully, as it was an incredibly powerful program once you learned it).

So I'm back to iDVD which still works after a fashion. You'll want myDVDEdit if you want to successfully burn widescreen videos as iDVD had a well known but unresolved encoding bug, even when it was still supported, that would cause widescreen video to be coded for pan & scan instead of letterbox. I can give the details of how to solve this problem if you want, just be aware.

The only other issue I've had with iDVD, aside from its not being as capable as DVDSP, is that when you insert your movies of FCPX, the chapters are there, but not the chapter titles (99% of the time anyway), so you have to go through and enter them by hand.

I find Toast to be completely inadequate to my needs; the inability to add audio to menus is just one of several shortcomings, though it's capable of many other things and I still use it for other purposes.

UiDVD doesn't understand anamorphic files. If you give it square pixel widescreen it has no difficulty making anamorphic DVDs.

@Steve: I haven't done anything complex with DVD SP on Yosemite, but what I have done worked without any issues.

What Tom said about anamorphic. In iDVD's heyday, users typically encountered problems displaying HDV (and DV anamorphic). Those formats that use square pixels, like most modern HD formats do, display correctly.

Russ