Yet, DVD's broader success clearly comes from bringing DVD creation to a more accessible level and isolating users from both the complexity and the esoteric jargon that plagued early authoring systems. At the highest levels of DVD creation, Scenarist's complete control over everything the DVD spec allows is the only way to go, even if the interface requires thorough training to accomplish even the most basic operations.Īdobe Encore's tight integration with Adobe Photoshop, as well as its price/performance ratio, makes it an attractive DVD authoring option. Older authoring programs like Sonic's Scenarist and DVD Creator (for the Mac OS) have a user interface, of course, but those applications were, and still are, built to give DVD authors direct access to the entire DVD specification. However, even the most basic authoring requires sophisticated programming to create that 'compliant disk image.' DVD discs can even be programmed to save viewer selections in a player's 'memory,' thus allowing advanced authors to write if/then logic statements that might, for example, jump to a different version of a movie if the viewer answers a question a certain way.

The DVD specification lays out surprisingly advanced ways for viewers to interact with that simple player, from scrolling through a menu and choosing a movie to selecting features like parental control, region coding, and copy protection to switching the view between different angles of the same scene with no more than a common remote. Job One for any DVD authoring software is simply building and organizing a set of files that a very simple (relative to a CPU-equipped device) consumer DVD player can read. Think of it as the GUI built around the powerful back-end DVD engine code that takes all your assets-video, menus, and navigation instructions-and turns them into a compliant 'DVD disk image.' What has followed is a proliferation of sub-$100, consumer-oriented packages for Windows from a variety of manufacturers, as well as an emerging class of highly capable professional products priced between $500 and $1000.Ī general move toward the 'abstraction layer' was the trigger for, and major outgrowth from, dramatic changes in the DVD industry. But, imagine this: In a two-year span from 1999 to 2001, DVD authoring software went from a high of $10,000 to free (with the purchase of a new Apple Mac OS computer). It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, of course, considering one is hardware and one is software.

Dvd authoring software mac