Re: Video Guest Book - DVD Authoring - Software wanted

OK, but it appears that he is looking for alternatives. TMPGenc Authoring Works 5 is a viable one. I will admit that I am not a DVD Architect expert. I keep my DVD menus pretty simple. My target market is the novice video user who may become confused with fancy menus. If they new how to operate a complex DVD menu, then they probably wouldn't be bringing me their camcorders and tapes to create DVDs for them.

I dare say that TAW5 is much easier to use than DVD Architect. I have toaught housewife with little computer skills and virtullay no video editing skills to use it. Plus, my experience is that it is much more bulletproof with regards to the flavors of video (and still image) files it can suck in. It can even re-author an existing DVD.

The only weakness I see with it is that it is not as flexible to customize menus. It does have the tools to build custom menus its just that there are come navigation constraints.

But as far as:

"- Allow me to drag all the files to the timeline and apply transitions. I can do that with Sony Vegas but am listing this as part of my wants."

TAW5 has a transition editor. Once you have your clips in the program you can open the transition editor and apply a transition to the clip.

"-Have a DVD menu which allows me to drop all my video clips into it and have it display a thumbnail showing the first frame. Ideally, I'd like to drop in 50+ files and have it build the entire menu. I can do this individually with DVD architect but if I have a 100 clips it will get old fast."

TAW5 excels at the above. I regularly have customers who bring me there hard disk camcorders full of video files. I can easily build a scene selection menu by dragging the files to my hard disk then dropping them into TAW5. The menu building system allows me to create a track menu(s) with the desired number of thumbnails per page (99 chapters per track) I usually do six per page - this is a nice size to visualize the first frame. If need be I can tweak the frame displayed on the thumbnail. Similary, a top menu can be included that can have thumbnail displays for each track (99 tracks per DVD).

John Pugnale
MVP Video Creations, Inc.