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Burn Baby, Burn!
By Steve Manke Not only did Steve Jobs release a powerful new-line of G4s yesterday, but he also added the SuperDrive to the runner up of the series. Two of three new machines debuted now feature the SuperDrive in their stock configuration. Given that the mid-range system has a price tag of $2,499, it means you get a system that can burn DVDs for a $1,000 less than you could last week (not to mention that the new system is faster :-). Apple’s new line of machines, now with more power to burn, means that more people will be writing DVDs than ever before. And it was a perfect time for Apple to announce the release of iDVD 2.0. With a host of new improvements, this software gives the average Mac user the ability to make complex looking DVDs with media rich content in less time and with greater ease than ever before. iDVD 2.0 will ship as a free upgrade to current owners of iDVD 1.0 in September. It will require OS X version 10.1, which is due for release at the same time. New features include new “Professionally” designed themes and the ability to add motion menus to the DVD interface. Full motion video can also be used in the background of DVD directories giving the average user the ability to create DVD interfaces comparable to even the best professionally mastered major motion picture. And where movie houses spend thousands of dollars to prepare the look and feel of their movies for mastering, the average Mac user can now prepare their home movies at their own pace and master them on their desktop computer. Apple also claims to have further reduced the time it takes to encode video footage to MPEG 2 format. Still keeping the encoding in software, Apple reduced the time to encode video from to 2X to just under 1X. This originally meant that one-hour of video previously took 2 hours to encode. Now that one-hour of video will take less than one hour to encode. And since this software package runs under OS X, it means that users will be able to RIP your video into MPEG 2 format in the background while you continue to work on other parts of their project. For a more conservative user, DVDs can also be used to archive thousands of digital photos. iDVD 2.0 provides the ability to quickly and easily organize your digital images into a DVD catalog that can be viewed on a television. New to the 2.0 release is the ability to add background music to the image archive providing a more media rich experience. Possibly the biggest disappointment in the original version of iDVD was the limitation of how much video a user could fit on one DVD. With the new version, Apple increases the original limitation of 60 minutes to a much more reasonable 90 minutes. The original version of iDVD was an unprecedented move in the field. Apple’s software developers have taken what was typically a very complicated process to prepare a DVD, and skillfully evolved it into an extremely user-friendly procedure. |