At Last!! Fast, Easy and Reliable DVD Authoring for the PC!

A review (Review? Hell, it’s an open endorsement!) of Pegasys’ TmpGEnc DVD

Honest, Mom! I only wanted to make a movie for you!!

Writing DVDs for data or for storing movie files isn’t really all that challenging in Windows. What is challenging is to actually enforce production values. Awww, who the hell am I trying to kid? Producing an interactive DVD with layered menus, solid production values and doing it in a reasonable amount of time in Windows is a complete, beard growing nightmare!!

Sorry, Mom!

But then I ran into some problems

The problems in the Windows environment are almost exclusively the result of some really poor authoring applications being the only choices available for the platform.

Check out some of the limitations I’ve discovered after spending way too much money on Products like Roxio VideoWave, MyDVD and bundled DVD software:

• Inability to cut frames from the middle of an MPEG stream
• Cannot advance through a stream without clicking millions of times on the mouse
• Loss of synchronization between audio and video
• Inability to build the Audio_TS and Video_TS folder structures to the hard drive for later use
• Production of those file structures for a one hour production can take 5-8 hours (on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4?!?!)
• Unreliable DVD burning engines (Major issue for Roxio products like VideoWave) cause huge losses of time and expensive DVD media
• Incredible time loss re-opening projects you haven’t finished yet
• Authoring tools are really pricey (minimum $100 all the way up to $150,000!)
• Building nested menus is an abstract art form which produces absolutely worthless results
• Video editing requires constant resetting of the Display Settings to knock back the DirectX Hardware Acceleration
• Did I mention that this takes hours and hours to do?

You wouldn’t dare just sit back and blame me as an inexperienced DVD tyro, would you? Well, I did my research and I suggest you do, too. Take a trip to http://groups.google.com and search on the phrase ‘DVD Authoring’. I’m not the only person screaming about conspiracy, software licensing stick-ups and crappy quality. I’m also not the only one confused as to why better alternatives don’t exist…or do they?

I knew there had to be something better out there, though. After all, the reason I got started on all this was because my brother started punching out absolutely beautiful productions with Apple’s iDVD software on his iMac and, when I sat down to attempt even the tiniest of his DVD techniques, I ran into software limitations and frustrations that were almost too huge to comprehend.

Now, don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. From what I learned out of his experiences, even the Mac user will run into some limitations on her equipment. These limitations on the Mac, however, are almost entirely because of the murky world of (possible) litigation between hardware, software and standards groups about how this feature could be delivered by Apple on that piece of hardware. It’s a mess out there and it’s one of the few instances in technology where I silently applaud the efforts of code hackers because they are the only ones out there in DVD land actually doing things with the end consumer as their primary consideration. It seems as though the other parties involved in DVD technology are completely unaware or unconcerned with the idea of “Fair Use”.

But on the PC, we can blame only a small part of what I ran into on such barriers. No, most of the software available for DVD production on a PC is either an extremely expensive gamble for the potential user or its quality just plain old sucks canal water!

The quickest way around MOST of these issues

Oh, that’s easy!! Go buy an Apple Powerbook. To do everything you want to do with DVDs on a Mac does mean you’ll spend about $1500 but that’s almost the same price you’ll spend to do the job on a Wintel PC, too. What you’ll get, though, is much less frustration in getting the job done and you’ll be able to do it shortly after powering up the machine.

Um, I already have a PC. Buying another computer DOES NOT solve my problem

I hear you. So let me save you some time, hair, heartbeats and antacid tablets. Don’t buy the following tools (I have used and cussed at each of them…for days, not mere minutes or hours):

• Anything from Roxio. Their tools are slow, incomplete and did I mention extremely slow? That doesn’t even touch on their missing features problems. If you do buy from them, buy only what you need for capturing video.
• Sonic MyDVD. Same issues as Roxio. Only slightly friendlier to the user as it fails to produce what you want.
• Arcsoft ShowBiz. Shall I repeat myself here?
• Ulead Studio. Even if you can pull off that Monk in a Self-Induced Coma stunt, you won’t live long enough to get a job done with this tool.
• InterVideo WinDVD tools. Maybe a strong tool but who could know that in a week? Spend an hour or two working with it and you’ll soon understand that it ought to have udders. It really milks the job while challenging your ability to understand what it’s about!
• Windows MovieMaker. This one has new problems. It’s only intended for Video CDs, it’s based on Windows Media Files and it writes to a proprietary format usable only by the smallest segment of reader machines. Sure, it’s free and it certainly works beautifully. But you can’t produce a $#&%#$ DVD with it!!

Chapman, you’re boring me. What should I use?

Okay, okay!! Run over to www.pegasys-inc.com and shuck out $68 US funds for TMPGEnc DVD Author. Yes, the site does have English and it is sometimes a bit like reading a Honda motorcycle manual but it’s worth the effort and the money. If you’re too cautious, having been stung over and over by the other DVD authoring vendors, go ahead and download the 30 day demo. It won’t take you 30 days, though, to decide this product is one to buy.

Now, before going any further, I’ll tell you that this product doesn’t really require me to write any systemic caveats. My hardware, while fairly current, suffered under the hands of all those preceding products and often failed. The system I’m using is no weak-kneed beast for this point in time. It is a Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz PC running a pair of RAID 0 drives with 512 Megs of RAM, an ATI Radeon 9700 8X AGP video card and a Sony DRU-500A DVD writer. These are all extremely stout components. The most questionable device in this system is the video card as I see that ATI is not selling it anymore (but it is selling the previous versions) and their driver quality has had me on the driver-of-the-month club for about a year now.

But that 11 item list of deficiencies you read at the beginning of this story is completely (no exaggeration) gone when I use TMPGEnc DVD Author. Now, instead of launching a job before I go to bed, going to step two before leaving for work and then, finally, dropping a DVD in the drive when I get home, I’ve finished the job in less than an hour using Pegasys’ fine product…and that’s not to mention that its internal DVD burning engine hasn’t once had to have an update to see my burner ( a la Roxio) nor has it encountered a single error writing to the burner (again, a la Roxio).

So, TMPGEnc DVD Author has these prioritized points going for it:

1. Reliable regardless of which authoring operation I’m using
2. Good feature set
3. Organized, simple interface
4. Step driven
5. Affordable
6. Requires little outside support. The help file is small because it really doesn’t require any more info than it has already

Oh Yeah? Prove It, Buddy!!!

Sure, I’d be happy to. I actually enjoy the process now. For this step-by-step, we’ll use an mpeg file since most of the DV cameras and other media recording devices will be saving these files as MPEG encoded files for your use.

So let’s start up TMPGEnc DVD Author

As you can see, the opening screen is Spartan and well organized along the Wizard paradigm. Also note that from this point we can start a new project, open an existing project OR get right down to it by writing a previously completed production to DVD. How is that last step possible? Well, unlike nearly all the other DVD authoring tools out there, this one can actually produce the required file structure to your hard disk for later re-use. This is handy (and very fast) if you’ve already created a DVD and want to make more copies of it!!

But let’s create a new DVD project. Click on “Create new project” to begin. The Wizard approach just takes us the to the Source Setup screen where we can add Tracks and Multimedia files.

Note also that TMPGEnc DVD Author will keep track of the size of the project so we have a visual cue as to when we’re approaching the limits of DVD media capacity.

Let’s add an MPG file. Click on Add File and browse to an MPG file. Once selected, the Add Clip dialog appears. Here, we can do end point and inline editing as well as adding chapters based on detected scenes, time intervals or manually add chapters…

Click on the ‘Chapter cut edit’ button so we can start to get this file cleaned up and the chapter entries made…

Note that the first chapter has already been added automagically. As we go through this process, a new chapter will be added every time we cut a section from the video. Don’t worry, we can delete them all and add what we’d like all on our own.

Notice this video clip begins with some screen snow and that the timeline bar shows us each frame. I want to get rid of all these snowy frames to make a more acceptable viewing experience. Start by clicking on the first frame and then clicking the ‘Set as start frame’ button. In the Video Controls group, there are 7 buttons. They are, from Left to Right:

1^st Group

Play – Pause – Stop

2^nd Group

Slow Rewind – Fast Rewind – Fast Forward – Slow Fast Forward

• Note that while doing this editing, I get full sound and experience no dropped frames from the video preview window

Now, it appears that the third frame is the last one in which there is any snow. Click the 4th frame and choose ‘Set as end frame’. Then click the Cut button.

Notice that the Timeline contents are immediately updated and that the time stamps and frame counts have been update.

Continue this process throughout the video file until all unwanted video segments have been removed. Feel free to use all the video controls. You’ll be amazed at how accurate your frame control is and you won’t even have to nudge your video Hardware Acceleration down. At the present, I’m doing this all on a 2 year old Dell 1.13GHz laptop with an NVidia GeForce2Go 32 meg video card. At other times, on this very machine, there have been extremely large problems working with video but none of those problems pop up while using this DVD authoring tool! BTW, the tool even allows me to use this machine despite the fact that it has no burners on board.

And here’s another former impossibility without knocking that acceleration down; screen shots taken while a video stream is playing often results in a screen shot with a black void where the video window is located. None of that here as the next shot shows and you’ll also notice that each frame in the timeline is clearly visible…

Now, after all those edits, we wound up with a new chapter at the beginning of every point where the video resumes. That’s helpful but not what I want. I want, instead, to have a chapter made at 1 minute intervals. It’s simple enough to do here. Just delete each of the chapters which were added and then click the Add button. The Add Chapter dialog appears and, from the 3 choices available, I choose to automatically add a chapter every minute…

I click OK and, in less than a second, this 500 meg video has all its chapters created!

Now that we’re done editing the film and creating chapters, click OK in the Add Clip dialog. We’re now returned to the Source Setup screen. We’re done adding clips so click on ‘Create menu’

Before starting in on the Menu creation phase, let me draw your attention to the bottom of the interface. There’s a Capacity bar which shows how much of more space is available for use on a standard DVD. If you exceed this capacity, don’t worry. Simply return to ‘Source setup’, click the last clip you added and, using the same clip editing techniques Cut enough from the end of this clip to resolve the space issue.

After you’ve done this, you can come back to DVD Author and create another DVD project using that file. If you intend to use it to make Disk 2 of a set, it’s no problem to trim the beginning from this clip up to the part where you ended it on Disk 1. Very handy!!

In the Menu creation process you’re likely to stumble over the real weak points of this tool. I find that the Menu Styles already created for the program are a little limited, primarily because the varieties of backgrounds and button images are not many. At this time, there appears to be no way to create templates using your own provided backgrounds, buttons, etc.

Nevertheless, be sure to step through all the menu pages to make sure each menu’s title says what you want, the default Firstplay action of the disk. and activate the motion menus if you’d like.

When you’re ready, click ‘Output’ and take a look at the available options.

For ease of duplication later, I usually go ahead and create the DVD folder for the project. This saves a lot of time if you want to make more copies of the DVD later! Click on the ‘Begin output’ button start the creation of your DVD movie!

This will take a little while (but nothing like the hours and hours normally required by other DVD applications). When the job is done, a new screen will appear asking about the next steps, like burning the DVD.

Click on the ‘Open DVD Writing Tool’ button and you’ll see a variety of pleasant, useful and reliable options…

During my tests, I discovered one more pleasant surprise with TMPGEnc DVD Author. Buffer underruns, the plague of burning with Roxio, are almost unheard of. In an attempt to cause a disk failure, I started a little challenge by flying Microsoft’s Flight Simulator while burning the DVD. Amazingly, the burn process experienced no hiccups and produced a flawless DVD! Coming back to the same DVD folders later, I used both the DVD Author and other DVD data burning tools (like Veritas RecordNow) to create new DVDs with no failures whatsoever!!

The God’s Have Spoken

You’re tired of futzing around with those mediocre DVD authoring tools? (oh man, THAT was a generous statement!) Tired of realizing that planning a feature set and the marketing campaign was more important to these vendors than writing a stable, capable, well-organized and speedy authoring application? Point your browser at www.pegasys-inc.com and try out TMPGEnc DVD Author. I understand Steve Jobs wishes he could get this on his Macintosh and Bill Gates is still attempting to edit frames of his children’s first birthday parties. Wait till he hears about this product!

Updated

The Pegasys URL has been corrected! Thanks so much to Katharine Scarritt for letting us know we had the wrong URL and for taking the time to provide the correct one!