Lights, Camera, Action!!!
by Gary Woods

A lot of you have been thinking about making your own DVDs so I thought it would be good to look at some of the tools available.

MyDVD Studio 6 is the most intuitive application I've seen for producing high quality DVDs quickly. The latest version lets you position video thumbnails manually on a menu, and you can also import MPEG-4 and DivX content. From Sonic Solutions $69.99 www.sonic.com

Then there's Pinnacle Studio 9 which features a second video timeline for picture-in-picture and chroma key effects, as well as image pan and zoom for slide shows plus it has an outstanding DVD authoring tool. Pinnacle Studio 9 Plus is$99.99 direct from www.pinnaclesys.com.

Next there's Ulead VideoStudio 8 which is a mature and full-featured piece of software. Its' new features include automatic background audio-track creation and pan and zoom capabilities. VideoStudio is $99.95 direct at www.ulead.com.

If you're a Mac fan you already know about Apple's iDVD as well as the graceful usability of iMovie. iMovie's interface is a model of simplicity, and it's video capture function is very simple. iMovie is included with Mac OSX.

When you really get serious about DVD Editing give a look at Adobe Video Collection 2.5 Professional suite. The Collection is $1,499 direct from Adobe www.adobe.com.

Finally when you've got your movie edited together you'll need to transfer it to DVD. For that you'll need something like Sonic DVDit 5. $299 direct from Sonic solutions www.sonic.com.

If you have any suggestions or questions for me please drop me a note at garyandlaury@santabarbaraproperties.com or see my column on the Internet at http://www.santabarbaraproperties.com or call me at (805) 729-0910