In January 2001, Apple unveiled its new SuperDrive, a CD reader/writer that can also write to DVD-R media. In addition to providing 4.7GB of data storage, the SuperDrive’s facility for creating DVD Video discs offered the promise of affordable, desktop DVD video authoring.
To fulfill that promise, Apple soon released iDVD, a consumer-oriented, drag-and-drop DVD authoring package, and DVD Studio Pro, a high-end, professional DVD authoring tool aimed at corporate, industrial, and professional users.
DVD Studio Pro began life as DVDirector, by Astarte, but Apple reworked the package, giving it a flashier interface, tight integration with Final Cut Pro, and a free software MPEG encoder. Easy to learn and flexible to use, DVD Studio Pro is an excellent first rev and does, indeed, fulfill Apple’s promise of affordable DVD authoring. However, authoring a smooth-playing DVD requires a good amount of analysis and tweaking, an area in which the program could use some work.
Compression
You can use your SuperDrive for creating 4.7GB HFS+ data discs, but DVD Studio Pro is meant strictly for creating DVD Video discs — the same type of discs you can rent at your local video store. The DVD Video spec is complex and allows for many different kinds of menus, multiple MPEG-2 video tracks, surround sound Dolby-encoded audio tracks, and even fairly sophisticated scripting. DVD Studio Pro provides full support for all these features.
Before you can perform any authoring, you’ll need to gather your media. DVD Studio Pro offers no content-creation tools, so you’ll need to create all your media -– video and audio tracks, menus screens, etc. -– using other programs.
The DVD Video spec requires video to be stored as MPEG-2 files with the audio stored separately as AIFF or AC3 files. So, all your video will need to be compressed to MPEG-2 before you can import it into DVD Studio Pro. There are a number of hardware and software tools for performing MPEG-2 compression, and Apple provides a free MPEG-2 QuickTime CODEC with DVD Studio Pro. With the CODEC installed, you can perform MPEG-2 compression from any program that can export and compress a QuickTime movie.
To use the CODEC you simply export from your video editor or from the Apple QuickTime Player. The MPEG exporter includes simple options for selecting NTSC or PAL, as well as field dominance. A Quality slider lets you choose a bit rate between 1.0 and 9.8 Mbps.
The included M.Pack utility’s MPEG Export dialog box
Exporting produces two files — an MPEG-2 video file and an audio file in AIFF format. When you build your final DVD, these two files get multiplexed together before being written to disk.
The MPEG Exporter is reasonably speedy for a software compressor. In our tests, the CODEC averaged around 4 minutes for each compressed minute of video when running on our 400MHz G4 PowerBook. We also found that exporting from the QuickTime player was roughly twice as fast as exporting from Final Cut Pro.
Obviously, as bit rate increases so does file size. So, if you have enough disk space, it can be very tempting to simply select the highest bit rate to guarantee the best quality.
However, DVD players have throughput limitations and, if you set your bit rate too high, the resulting file may be big enough to bog down your player. The resulting disc will not play smoothly. Unfortunately, DVD Studio Pro offers no analysis tools for determining effective throughput. The only way to find out if your bit rate is playable is to compress your video, put it into DVD Studio Pro project, build the project, and test the results. If you find stuttering, you’ll have to go back and re-compress. Obviously, this cycle can be somewhat time-consuming given the CODECs long compression times.
Final Cut users will find the CODEC has a maddening tendency to produce very dark video. Apple is apparently aware of this problem and is working on a solution. [Editor’s note: Apple’s recent update may have fixed this problem. We are researching this and will amend this story with our results very soon.] In the meantime, you can work around the trouble by exporting your Final Cut projects as DV or Animation-compressed movies, and then performing your MPEG compression from the QuickTime Player. (Some users have reported trouble compressing reference movies, though we had no difficulties.)
Finally, if size and throughput issues are a concern, you may want to consider compressing your audio files into AC3 format using the included “A.Pack” audio compression software. A.Pack takes your AIFF files and exports them in AC3 format. We found we almost always had to convert to AC3 format to preserve audio/video sync in our final disk. Using AIFF files resulted in bandwidth troubles.
In addition to handling compression, A.Pack allows you to create Dolby 5.1 surround-sound mixes through a simple drag-and-drop interface. Note that you’ll need to use your audio-mixing or video-editing software to create separate AIFF files for each channel. A.Pack can use these to create your surround-sound mix.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on July 17, 2001
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