Apple iDVD 5

Consumer DVD authoring system with pro-level features

By Dave Nagel

Summary: iDVD 5 expands Apple's already powerful offering in the consumer DVD authoring market with a serious performance boost, new themes (including motion buttons and 3D drop zones), one-step DVD authoring and other niceties that help bring DVD creation further into the mainstream.
Recommendation: 5 out of 5
Users: iDVD is targeted toward consumers, but it's powerful and feature-rich enough to find a home in the videography and post-production markets as well.
Platform: Mac OS X
Price: iDVD is included as part of the iLife '05 suite, which is available for $79. It's also included free (along with the rest of iLife) on all new Macintosh models.
More information: http://www.apple.com

iDVD 5 is part of Apple's iLife '05, a suite of creativity tools targeted toward the consumer market. I'm breaking it out into its own separate review because, like one other application in the suite, it's worth the price of admission alone, and certainly worthy of special coverage. 

Now in its fifth incarnation, iDVD continues the tradition of excellence in creative production on the Mac, with Apple itself leading the way. iDVD 5 is billed as a consumer-level DVD authoring suite, which is certainly justified by the ease of use of this program, particularly when compared with other DVD authoring packages on the market. But its simplicity and ease of use belie this program's power. It's easy enough for the most novice software users, but it's sophisticated and customizable enough to suit professionals as well--everyone from event videographers selling wedding videos to customers to post-production houses distributing work to clients.

Ease of use: 5 out of 5
The basis of iDVD's workings is a simple drag and drop interface. Pull a movie off your desktop, drag it into your interface, and iDVD will not only create a button for you that links to the track, but it will also create a chapter index (if you have chapters in your movie) and begin encoding the video for you immediately. Want to create a slideshow? Just grab a bunch of images from your hard drive or iPhoto, drag them into your interface, and iDVD generates the slideshow for you. All you have to do is select a theme from the list of available themes, add in your assets (stills, movies and audio), and you're good to go. Click the "Burn" button, and soon you'll have a disc compatible with most DVD players.



iDVD 5 takes ease of use a step further with the addition of new themes and a new feature called "OneStep DVD." With OneStep DVD, you just plug in your camera in VCR mode and insert a blank disc. DVD Studio Pro then rewinds the video in your camera, captures your footage and automatically burns it onto a DVD as an auto-play DVD-Video disc. Could it be any easier?




But if you'd rather create a disc with menus, multiple tracks and still images, iDVD 5 also provides you with 15 new themes (91 total themes) to get you started. What's great about the new themes in version 5 is the addition not just of motion buttons and drop zones, but 3D motion objects as well. All of the motion elements are fully dynamic, so you can enter in your own button titles and styles (if you don't like the ones included with the themes). And you can drop any moving or still images in the motion drop zones as well. The screen shot below shows the "Baby Mobile" theme, which includes six 3D drop zones that spin around the screen like a mobile.



Each drop zone is numbered, and you can simply drag your elements into those zones as they're moving. Or, if that's a bit too tricky for you, you can double-click the drop zone, and iDVD will open up your media bin (your iPhoto library), as well as a special window for dropping your assets into your project's drop zones.



And, of course, iDVD 5 includes all of those great ease of use features that have made previous versions of iDVD so popular: automatic encoding within the application; easy access to themes and meiad; easy modification of themes (dragging and dropping in a new background image or audio file, for example); easy access to change fonts and button styles; the ability to add DVD-ROM content through a simple dialog; a status indicator showing how much of the disc's capacity remains; and a map view, where you can view all of your menus in one place and make changes there, rather than having to browse through your entire disc structure whenever you want to change an element, add a track, etc.



Features: 5 out of 5
For those of you looking for more than just ease of use in your authoring system, iDVD also provides a number of features found in Apple's higher-end authoring systems, like menu transitions (actually introduced in iDVD, then later carried over to DVD Studio Pro), fully customizable menus (graphics, audio and other element styles); a safety zone display; a small amount of customizability in the encoder settings (performance versus quality); support for both PAL and NTSC standards; the ability to burn a disc image, in addition to actual DVD media; and, with some effort (as we'll explore in future tutorials), the ability to use custom shapes in buttons. iDVD 5 doesn't add a huge number of features, but it does add some important ones.

First, it includes support for more media types, including DVD-R, +R, -RW and +RW. Second, it adds support for HDV (the consumer-level high-definition format), automatically capturing and converting footage to standard DV. Third, the map view is improved, allowing you to batch edit your menus and even add media in the map view. And it also offers tighter integration with the rest of the iLife applications, including iPhoto, iTunes and iMovie.

Obviously it's not going to have all of the higher-end features available in professional-level authoring software. For example, there's no scripting, no subtitles, etc. But for consumer-level software--and for most DVD authoring jobs--is about as full-featured as you'd want.

Performance: 4 out of 5
Performance also gets a significant boost in iDVD 5 compared with previous releases. The application itself launches more quickly, and the responsiveness of iDVD's various controls is improved dramatically. Encoding speeds vary. With the "Best Performance" option enabled on a dual 2 GHz G5, footage is encoded approximately in real time (one second of encoding for one second of 720 x 486 video), although I did experience speeds much faster than that--up to 0.33 seconds of encoding time per second of footage. (This is, incidentally, nowhere near the performance of DVD Studio Pro's built-in encoder on the same machine.)

Quality: 5 out of 5
Like just about anything Apple touches, iDVD is a merger of art and engineering. Its interface and workflow are immaculate. Take a look at some of the "freebie" DVD authoring packages out there that iDVD is up against in the consumer space. There's no comparison. First of all, most of them don't include an MPEG encoder. Second, they're flaky in terms of workflow: they just don't do what you want the way you want to do it. And, third, they're depressing to look at. iDVD is is pleasure to work with, and it does what you want to do in the easiest way possible. Plus, the encoding quality out of iDVD is excellent. There are, of course, professional systems--including Apple's own DVD Studio Pro and COmpressor--that will do it better and faster. But come on. iDVD is just great for the money.

Overall: 5 out of 5
iDVD is a tremendous application for both home authoring and certain types of professional work. As a part of the iLife '05 suite, it's worth the price of admission alone ($79 retail, free with any new Mac purchase). It's easy to use, flexible and powerful for an application in this space. If you have a Mac and an older version of iLife, it's worth the upgrade. If you don't have a Mac, think about getting one for the iLife applications alone. After all, new Macs these days are less expensive than ever.

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