Digital Home Thoughts: DVDit Pro 6.0: Not Exactly All I Had Hoped For

Reviewing software is a lot like going to see a movie in the theatre: odds are, you have some expectation about the movie based on what others have told you about it, who's starring in it, who's directing it, and the marketing you've been exposed to. When I'm reviewing a software application, it's hard to come at it with a completely blank slate, because from the very first exposure to the company website I'm processing information about what kind of software this will be based on the company that made it. Such is a the case with DVDit Pro 6.0. It is marketed as DVD authoring software for professionals, and sold for $399 USD. My expectations were thus set fairly high – I was expecting this software to be significantly faster, more stable, and more optimized for fast workflow than consumer-level DVD authoring applications. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case on all counts and I found this application severely lacking in many ways.

Let's start with the good news first: the user interface is impressive [image]. It allows for a highly optimized workflow, and comes with several preset configurations that allows you to focus on a particular aspect of your project. It offers complete customization of the workspace, so when I was using this software for a real-world project (creating a wedding DVD for my friends) I was able to come up with the best configuration for accessing everything quickly. It also has many other features professional video DVD authors will likely appreciate.

DVDit Pro allows you to import still photos to create slideshows, and will auto-fit the length of each slide to match the music length – nice! I can't stress this enough: the quality of the slideshows for still images is jaw-dropping. Sonic has some secret sauce here, because compared to every other product I've seen or used, the difference in the end result is like night and day. I think I figured out at least part of the secret: when watching the slideshow, just as a transition starts, the quality of the image drops for a split second, and it looks a lot like the slideshows I've seen from other DVD authoring products. I think what Sonic does is display the full-resolution JPEG images in the video stream, then uses the images converted to MPEG for the transitions, and back again to still images after the transition is over. The end result is fantastic quality slideshows.

Ok, that's it for the good news, the rest of this review will read like a critique list, because I ran into snag after snag when using the software for my wedding video project.

Although the end result looks great, some things about the slideshow process are a little screwy: when I was in thumbnail view of a slideshow with 163 images, clicking down on the scrollbar causes it to go from using 2% CPU usage to 99% CPU usage. The same thing happens with any sort of screen redraw - so if you open up a Web browser over top DVDit Pro, your system will hang for a moment while DVDit Pro uses 99% of your CPU. There's also no way to change the size of the thumbnails - I wasn't working on a very high resolution screen (1440 x 900), but the image thumbnails are quite tiny (perhaps 100 pixels wide) and difficult to see. You're also unable to minimize the application while the Edit Slideshow window is open, which is something I'd expect if this application were designed in 2001. Modern apps should not be so greedy with window control. Lastly, it automatically archives all the original images without prompting first, so this can add extra bloat to your project that you may not need. Archiving the original images is a great feature, but the option should be activated with a user prompt, and found in the main slideshow interface, not hidden in the button attributes (which took me forever to find).

It's easy enough to create video buttons for your menu system - you drag the video from the Media Palette onto the menu, and the button is created. There are a lot of ways to manipulate the buttons - you can alter the colour, size, and direction of the drop shadow, among other things. It's also easy to change the image on the button if you'd like to display a certain part of the clip. Although there's an Animate Button check box, which I had assumed would trigger video playback on the button when it was selected, that function seemed to do nothing when looked at in the simulation mode. That's rather surprising, because most entry-level DVD burning tools allow for video-animated buttons. So this is either a bug or a lack of an important feature.

Overall, I found the program to be a quite buggy - on two separate occasions DVDit Pro coughed up an Internal Software Errors [image], usually when I was playing around with button options and simulating playback. What's particularly frustrating is that the ultra-cryptic error message gives no clue as to what the actual problem is - meaning that if it was caused by a change you made to a button, you'd never know it. This made me feel somewhat paranoid when using the application, which is certainly not how you want to feel about software costing $399 USD. At one point early in the wedding video project I hit a brick wall with this error code, and rather than debug every aspect of my project, I simply started over. Needless to say, I wasn't impressed. If some part of my project was corrupt or invalid, the software should tell me and allow me to fix it, not simply cough up nonsense errors.

Also, when I shut it down it continued to run in the background quite frequently - I had to manually kill the process using the Windows Task Manager. At the time of my testing there were no software updates for the program (and still aren't as far as I can tell). I was using version 6.0 and considering the product was announced in August of 2005, this either means the software itself is bug-free and my laptop is the real problem, or Sonic is a bit lax when it comes to releasing bug fixes. I prefer to see regular bug-fixes from software companies.

There also seems to be some flaws in how the software decides to transcode and prepare the content - I rendered a 4 GB project to an ISO file, which took nearly two full hours. Without shutting down the software, I selected the same option again (with a different filename) without changing anything in the project, and it proceeded to render the entire thing again from scratch. That's not software intelligence, that's software stupidity. And when you factor in how long DVD rendering/encoding takes, even small bugs like this cost countless hours of end-user time. And speaking of time, the video rendering user interface is severely lacking [image]. All it says is "Transcoding Video" – no time estimate for completion, no indication of which file it's currently transcoding, no further details. For a professional application, I would have expected more – even free CD burning applications will tell me how long a project is expected to take.

Unfortunately, even when DVDit Pro does give estimations, it's way off base, which caused me frustration. I had a project that was 4.5 GB in size - DVDit Pro reported I had 210 MB of space left, meaning it should fit on a standard DVD without fuss. Yet after waiting nearly an hour for it to transcode the video and audio, when it got to the DVD burning stage the process failed saying my project was too big. After clicking OK the application crashed. In subsequent attempts to encode that same project, I continually received errors about missing DLL files [image]. I searched the DVDit Pro help files and came up with nothing, but a Google search revealed a similar problem with Premiere Elements 2.0, and interestingly enough the fix worked.

One feature I'd like to see is a list of project assets and their respective current file sizes, and estimates after conversion. It's extremely frustrating to have a project that's close to being too much content, and not being able to tell what you need to trim. Although the Media Palette has a details mode that tells you the file size, the Project window has no such mode. It's impossible to tell how much space a slideshow is taking up for instance.

The application doesn't feel fast or particularly streamlined - for instance, when you load a previously saved project without exiting the application, it re-loads all of the included template files again. How much sense does that make? I tested this software on a fairly high-performance laptop with a Pentium M 1.86 Ghz processor, 2 GB of RAM, and twin 7200 RPM 100 GB hard drives. It felt exceedingly slow along every step of the way. All told, DVDit Pro left a fairly bitter taste in my mouth. My friends' wedding DVD turned out great, and looked very professional. But getting to the final product was brutal – a $399 application aimed at professionals should be neither painful nor frustrating, and DVDit Pro was both to me.

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He's still searching for the ultimate DVD authoring application.