This is simple, intuitive software for creating professional quality DVDs. You can easily import video, audio, and still images all in a wide variety of formats. For those of you with Photoshop, DVDit uses those images seamlessly, even separating layers for special effects.

Interestingly enough, a friend wanted me to make her a DVD of Oprah’s lessons with Echart Tolle, lessons from his book, A New Earth. After I’d downloaded the files, DVDit did not recognize them, though I was told they were MPEG-4s.

So, I simply changed the file extension from .m4v to .mp4 and bingo, DVDit brought them right in.

Left click on any part of this picture to open a widow with more information.

As you can see from the default layout, you have your project layout on the left at the top. Below that are your media files, backgrounds, stills, etc. You simply drag them up to the project to create the structure. The project layout section allows you two views, the structure and thumbnails.

The Pallet section below the project (on the left) contains your templates, media files, images, buttons, and frames. For any one of these, you have the option to go to your disk and search for more, however, if you open a folder containing your media, you can simply click and drag your media into here.

I’ve never used a button (I create my own) and I haven’t a clue what “Frames” are used for. We all use those things we need, and we learn about new features by experimenting.

There are a lot of things going on in DVDit that I haven’t a clue about, but the nice thing is, you learn as you go.

You see, the great thing about this program is you don’t have to know a thing to create some great looking DVDs. You simply learn by experimenting and playing. However, be careful and remember to save your work. There is no autosave feature.

Below the Preview Screen is the timeline of your movie or slide show. Here is where you can set alternate audio and subtitles (you can even add your own subtitles to the video). You can also set chapter points. The chapter points will then show up in your project outline and you can then reference menu choices to those chapter points.

On this particular video (Oprah’s Classes), I used the controls on the preview screen to cut out the initial advertisement that came with this video.

The Preview Screen is very handy. You can preview the movie (and edit the starting point and ending points as I’ve stated above) and you can preview your menu.

You have to choose to preview the entire project to get your moving menu to move and animated buttons. One drawback is that to preview your moving menus, DVDit has to render them first (and this can take some time).

Making a menu button of your movie is as simple as click and drag. When you choose to preview the project, you can see all your animated menu buttons in action.

Creating a motion menu is just as easy: click and drag. On the right is the Attribute Window. If you click on the menu, it has Menu Attributes. If you click on a movie or slide show, it contains the Movie Attributes, and if you click on one of your menu buttons or text, the window contains Button Attributes.

To create a motion button, drag the button into the Preview screen, then choose in the Attribute window: Animate Button. You can also drag your movie onto the menu, and a menu button of your movie will appear. Choose to animate it and you’ll have an animated button of your movie.

On the status line at the bottom of DVDit, you’ll see information that you really need: how much space you’ve used/how much space you have left. You can set the type of DVD you’re recording to and on the far right it tells you if your project is NTSC or PAL (NTSC is a Japanese and American standard; PAL is the European standard). You’ll also see when the last time you saved your project.

Your Preview Screen is very helpful. You can display the “safe” portions of your screen. Without these, you’ll find a lot of things you thought were visible on your TV are not. You’ve got grids to align your text and buttons. You’ve a few controls that help you align them, just play with them.

I love the ability to type text characters with an outlined edge. So often no matter what color you choose for text, somewhere in the background is that color and you can’t read all your text. With an outline of a different color, the letters stand out.

If you want to make a quick slide show and add it to the CD, this program does it all. You can put 999 slides into a show with multiple music tracks and chose from 65 different transitions.

DVDit is just one powerful and easy program for making DVDs of your movies and slide shows. The learning curve is a breeze and the outcome is great.

My favorite feature is the fact that you can create a DVD without a menu. I take a movie off the TV, edit out the commercials, add a cartoon to it, and la viola, you’ve popcorn night at the movies. You slip the DVD into your DVD player and you get a cartoon and a movie. Readers under the age of 40 might not know what the significance of this is, so let me fill you in. Before the days of rampant commercialism, when you went to a movie, you saw a cartoon (they were not made for kids) followed by a movie. In even earlier days, you got to see a handful of newsreels too because televisions had yet to be parked in every home in America.

Additionally, every movie you add is automatically set up to play the next movie in the project. You can create a “playlist” which you hook up to a Play All button, but if every movie goes onto the next automatically, you can just choose to play the first one and sit back. If you’re making a DVD on which you want every video to return to the menu, that’s just as easy. The “default” is go to the next movie.

Your menu buttons or menu choices you create (using text) are numbered as you make them, 1, 2, 3, etc. So, make sure you think out your menu before making it. If you put them out of order, the routing will be off and you’ll have to manually adjust the routing (routing is where the highlight goes when the user presses the arrows on his remote).

The routing of the buttons is handled automatically. But you MUST debug them by constantly running the preview. Most of the time you’ll see that very often the program has figured it all out for you and you don’t have to do a thing. But forget to check just one time, and you’ll make a DVD that you’ll just have to do over because of this.

One more thing, you can tell DVDit to make your movie without re-encoding the MPEG assets imported into the program. This saves  a lot of time.

However, now I have to tell you about a few drawbacks and problems I’ve had with the program, or, I wouldn’t be completely honest with you. As a retired computer programmer, I can tell you that all programs have their plusses and minuses. The plusses of DVDit outweigh the minuses, but still, when things go wrong, I have to use another DVD writing software package to get the job done, and wouldn’t it be really nice to have just one that works all the time?

First off, as I’ve stated in our introduction to this set of reviews, DVDit cannot transcode your movies at different rates. You must choose one rate for the entire DVD, 8000kbps to 2000kbps. Why would you want to choose? Well, if your movie is so large that you see on the status line that your project will not fit on a DVD, well, then you have to shrink the transcoding rate. The default is a CBR or Constant Bit Rate. I prefer VBR or Variable Bit Rate, because this guarantees better quality playback. Here’s what the documentation of DVDit says about this:

CBR encoding uses the same bit-rate for every second of video regardless of the video's complexity, so quality worsens as the video becomes more complex, and bits are wasted when there is not much action.

In a VBR encode, the encoder uses higher bit-rates for complex sections and lower rates for "easy" sections, constantly adjusting to keep the overall bit-rate to a target value. VBR encoding can provide the same quality as a CBR encode but at a lower overall bit-rate (so you can fit more video on the disc), or better quality than a CBR encode at the same overall bit-rate.

Adjusting your transcoding rate will allow you to fit large movies on your DVD, however, I have learned to always create a “disk image” first, and then copy that to DVD using Clone DVD2. Why? Well, once in a while DVDit’s output is still larger than a DVD. You have to keep in mind that the size listed on the status bar is an estimate only.

I’ve also found that, with some movies, those MPG-2 files that were created from AVI files that DVDit did not like, lowering the transcoding rate does NOTHING to the size of the output. This is a bug in DVDit. I’m going to talk to support about this, but since I have a handful of programs to chose from I just go and use another program.

Another slight bug is found in a submenu or second menu. Normally the first choice highlighted (during playback) is the first choice in the menu. DVDit pointed to the third choice on playback, and I could not find a way to change this.

And DVDit does NOT have a fit to disk option. This is really a drawback. So, when I can’t bring down the size using a different transcoding rate, then I just have to go to a different program to make the DVD.

I originally ran across this when testing a variety of file types. I had friends send me movies in different formats to test. One format I tested was an avi format. DVDit absorbed it with no problem. Then I tried to test the DVD and it crashed.

You should ALWAYS try to play back your project before burning. When I find a file that crashes upon reviewing the project, I take it into one of my other programs and convert it. So I took the avi file and converted it to an MPEG-2 file using Roxio Easy Media Creator. Then I brought it into DVDit and found out that when I changed the transcoding rate, the size of the output didn’t drop one bit. That is a bug.

So, apparently DVDit does not accept some formats, and even when modified, DVDit chokes on them.

Another gripe is that the menus and buttons have a very high overhead. If it were possible to transcode these thing at a different rate than the rest of the DVD you’d see a great savings in output size.

If I had a wish list, it would include action transitions: when you press a menu choice, you get a little video of a page being ripped away or a page turning or some kind of short action video leading into your choice. However, using a variety of my video editors and slide show creators, I’ve been able to create small videos that play before the chosen movie. This adds an even more professional feel to the DVDs.

I’d also want to control the volume of the audio to the menu. You can control the volume to the movies and slide shows, but not the menu. When I use a background audio, I first bring it into Wave Studio (it’s a neat program) and cut the volume in half. Then when bring it into DVDit, it won’t blast me every time the main menu pops up.

As far as support goes, it’s pretty good. It took me a while to get past a few problems, but if you’re in a hurry, well, you’re going to be disappointed. When you have a problem, you write to them and wait for them to write back. It can take two or three letters to get everything right. You’ll be asked to jump through a whole lot of hoops to get everything working properly, but once it is up and running, it’s a pretty darn good program for the money.

DVDit also has an HD version that writes to Blueray HD DVDs. As soon as the price of HD TVs come down to where TVs should be (hey, it’s a TV...it’s not worth 5 to 10 thousand dollars...it’s a TV) I’ll probably get this.

There is also an additional program that comes packaged with DVDit called eDVD. It allows you to add links to web pages, and links to things on the disk, that can be reached when the DVD is played on a computer, but not on your television. I’ve never used this program as I’ve never had a need for anything like this.