Customer Reviews

DVD Studio Pro 3 for Mac OS X: Visual QuickPro Guide

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Thank you Martin Sitter! I am a filmmaker/photographer who needed to move into the realm of making DVDs. You took me from A to Z in an informative, easy to understand way. I really liked how you started at the beginning of what the differences are between DVDs and CDs and especially what countries use what format (all those film festival markets!) Words like MPEG-2 video streams, encoding, and assets roll off my tongue now and it all makes sense!
You have opened up a new world for me and I am grateful!
- Lisa Bevis, Los Angeles, CA

DVD Studio Pro was born as DVDirector, a $5,400 software package from a company named Astarte. Seeing a very good thing, Apple bought Astarte in April of 2000 and turned it into DVD Studio Pro for a price of $1,000. The first release was - well it was a first release. In competition with this software was DVDMaestro, a quite advanced product, but also a quite advanced $25,000.

Apple mixed all this technology together with the golden third release at only $499. All of a sudden professional quality DVD authoring was available to virtually anyone.

This book starts with a discussion on what hardware you need to work with DVD Studio Pro 3. DVD files are huge, often measured in gigabytes. You'll need processing power, memory, and disk space. Starting from this simple view, it continues in a step by step basis through every aspect of producing a DVD. The writing style is clear and concise, with just the right amount of theory mixed in with practical instruction. Considered an intermediate level book, this is not exactly a beginners 'this is how you turn it on' book.

You'll note that this is also a very reasonably priced book.

Some reviewers have suggested that this is not a beginner's book. It's not ... if you are looking for an A-B-C approach. But as a beginner DVD maker who wants to learn more about what's going on "under the hood," this book is great!

Thanks, Martin! :-)

My number one recommendation for learning DVD Studio Pro ( versions 3 or 4, as not
much changed between 3 and 4, except adding HD authoring). If your a self taught person
like me, who likes to learn, or just wants to be able to author a DVD in an hour without
getting technically lost in Apple's Manual for the program, GET THIS BOOK!!!!

This book will take you from A to Z but seam to be a little outdted because Studio Pro is now 4.0 but anyway, this book is well done. I will gladly share it to my videographer friends.

Basically a excellent tutorial and reference. But unfortunately falls into the
do-everything cracks by forcing someone who wishes to produce a simple slideshow only to learn all about how to create complex video audio supported programs. Before the user can put together a slide show they will have to learn many functions that have no relation ship to what they ultimately want wind up with.