iDVD - Easily create professional-looking DVD projects
Nov 25, '02 01:06:27AM
Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:

[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
Although I wrote a mini-review of iDVD2 just over a year ago, it's never been featured as a Pick of the Week, which is a bit of an oversight on my part. This weekend I had the chance to use it quite a bit again, and my time with iDVD helped remind me that it's a very impressive piece of software.
iDVD takes away nearly all the complexity behind creating a professional looking DVD project. Although iDVD may not meet the neets of people who make a living creating DVDs (that's what DVD Studio Pro is for!), for nearly everyone else, it should be more than sufficient. iDVD includes a number of very sharp pre-made themes, and allows you to easily create themes of your own. You can have full motion menus, background music, slide shows, and choose from a number of unique button styles, all wrapped in an easy to understand interface. When I used it for the first time last year, I had my first project ready to burn in something less than an hour.
iDVD isn't perfect - there are some niggling glitches with font displays, the handling of slide shows could be improved (there's a 99 slide limit per folder), and you give up a certain amount of creative freedom in exchange for the ease of use (but that's a tradeoff I'll gladly make any day!). But overall, just like iMovie before it, iDVD puts a tool in the general consumer's hands that gives them the abilities that, prior to its release, could only be had in a Pro-level product (with a matching Pro-level degree of complexity).
With the newly announced Superdrive-equipped Titanium PowerBooks, the universe of potential iDVD users has just increased, and hopefully more people will get a chance to see what a nice job Apple has done with this software ... and I can't wait to see what iDVD3 brings to the party, whenever it gets here!
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