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Reviews of DVD authoring in Windows Vista Home Premium?

post #1 of 5
2/5/07 at 9:38am
Thread Starter 
Have any Windows Vista Home Premium users tried the new DVD Authoring functionality? This, to me, is one of the most significant new features in the OS, especially considering there are really no open-source or other free solutions out there. I note that many online/magazine reviews of the OS claim that there are few new features justifying the upgrade to Vista, yet they never mention the DVD authoring capability.

My DVD burner came with burning, but not authoring software, so whenever I want to do a DVD of my own, I have to bring the raw files in to my office and use the Sonic software that came with Windows XP MCE (which is on my desktop machine at work). Built-in authoring capability (among other things) would possibly make Vista Home Premium a worthwhile upgrade for me.

I am interested to hear about anyone's experiences with this feature. Many thanks.
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post #2 of 5
2/5/07 at 3:25pm

Re: Reviews of DVD authoring in Windows Vista Home Premium?

I'm interested to try it out. I've used Pinnacle Studio for years and like it, but will give the Vista one a whirl soon out of curiosity.
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post #3 of 5
2/6/07 at 3:28am

Re: Reviews of DVD authoring in Windows Vista Home Premium?

I looked at this for about ten minutes. It's pretty lame.

It's a two-page wizard. First you pick files, video and pictures. It seems to be set to 150 minutes for single-sided and 300 for double, and totals the times from the clips, implying it will always re-encode to make it fit.

The next page shows a preview. There are a few dozen menu styles, which look decent when you preview, but there is no motion in the menu, so you have to guess or try them one at a time. You can set the title, the labels for Play, Scenes, and a one-page Notes screen, where you can type a few sentences.

You can set video and audio for the menus and choose font and button styles. For a slide show, you can set the music (a playlist), duration, and transition; and whether to pan/zoom (Ken Burns effect).

The Scene menu is automatically generated. You get two pages of six motion thumbnails. No control over the locations.

The second page has a Burn button. You can only burn to disc, so I couldn't confirm that it would re-encode DVD-ready files.

On the plus side, according to the Help, it encodes the audio in Dolby Digital. You get the option for 4:3 or 16:9.
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post #4 of 5
2/8/07 at 9:20am
Thread Starter 

Re: Reviews of DVD authoring in Windows Vista Home Premium?

Thanks for the info, Ken. It looks like this will hardly be the killer app that will drive a lot of Vista upgrades.
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post #5 of 5
2/8/07 at 9:55am

Re: Reviews of DVD authoring in Windows Vista Home Premium?

At least it'll match that video editing app from XP. These will give the noobs something to play with. *flares nostrils and marvels at own smugness*
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