SP 2

Hi Guys,

Just received SP 2.

--ken

Mine has been on vehicle for delivery since 6:30AM. What kind of vehicle is this, a skate board with a trailer hitch or what?

Congrats. I am going bonkers waiting to try it.

Oh boy are you going to like this. I have never worked with SP 1.5 so I don't know what it was like before, but SP 2 is cool.

--ken

I am still trying to reserve judgment until I actually use it. Believe it or not, I very much like version 1.5. It is very basic and lacks features. I would agree with anyone on those points, but if you know basic of Photoshop and can use Final Cut Pro or After Effects for compositing, you can really create almost anything you can dream up.

Templates scare me because pretty soon you start to see a lot of DVDs that have that same old cookie cutter look. It reminds me of Microsoft FrontPage web sites. So far I have 100% success identifying FrontPage web sites and I hate them all. The way DVDSP 1.5 works, you have to create everything from scratch and it has actually improved my creativity. In my opinion, it is as fundamental as QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign for page layout. Those are blank pages and you create the best page layouts with the use of many applications, like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop as well as good photography. I have yet to see templates where you add text and images and it does the layout for you because that defeats the whole purpose of the layout artist. Their job is to create the right look and feel for what ever the content is. Hopefully it is just better and doesn't automate too much. I don't like iDVD for a reason. I don't want to see DVD Studio Pro become iDVD 4. If I can more easily express my own creativity, then I am all for it. I hope they have good documentation. I have had a couple books on pre-order for a very long time, but because nothing has yet arrived, I still have so many questions that I am anxiously awaiting answers to.

The preview videos of the software look good, and if Apple made story use as easy as it looked in the video, they will have solved a difficult to master process.

It just arrived...

I am off to play!!

Hi Alex,

I agree about using the stock templates. I could never use one for a customer.

I started off with a new project in Basic and built from the ground up. Works well, nice that you can drag a new drop zone.

I am loving this.

--ken

First thing I have done is consider my old work style and imported in my own button PICT map and background. I am used to the graphical view I had before, but this is okay too. The older method is far more visual about seeing things from the menu / track relationship where as this has made those into pure menu and property functions. I can see I need to be more careful in that area.

I was able to create an image based test of a simple project pretty quickly. Now I have to go through all the rest of this and see what these new features afford me. Right off the bat though, I like the area where I can select what remote control buttons the user has access to. That is very well done.

The book looks pretty darn thick and they did include a tutorial so I think I have everything I need. My concern over losing that base functionality is addressed here. I can work pretty much the way I want to. I already see a few things I am very happy with. I like the title / action safe composite view and I noted you can tear off the tabs so you see menu and track at the same time.

I really would like a graphical relational view as well though. Perhaps it is someplace and I don't know it. This looks pretty good though.

Where is mine?

I dunno, was your name on it?

I did the basic tutorial. Apple put a lot of thought into this. I'll do the other two tutorials later, but I am impressed. The workflow is so much different. This is a completely different program now. The creation of menus is certainly radically different now. It will take you less time then it did in 1.5.

I am kind of stunned over how different this is now. If you are starting of fresh with no prior knowledge of 1.5, you are probably in a better place. My old methods are still in my head and I tend to look for where properties are of things I would have done in the old version. There is so much streamlining in here. Someone really sat down and considered the work flow from end to end and completely re-engineered it.

I'll give it a big thumbs up...

Nicely done Apple!

Ken,

DVDSp 1.5 was way uncooler! Kinda like from the stone age compared to DVDSP 2.

John

Alex how does it handle projects from DVDSP 1.5?
/jason/

<<Templates scare me because pretty soon you start to see a lot of DVDs that have that same old cookie cutter look>>

In my opinion - templates are just idea starters. I agree it is way to easy to utilize a template as the idea and go "cheape", but I really like the Asset Managment in DVDSP 2 as it allow you to use file browsing to the max.

Lets say, you want a Main Menu and a Chapter menu. There are starter assets there with buttons that can be changed to your hearts content. Completely linked buttons can be moved around the Menu Editor as if it was working in Photoshop. No more creating Photoshop Buttons to interact with the remote.

I spent the day yesterday going to the DVD Entertainment show at Universal City Hilton. It was generally a waste of my time except for the 90 minute presentation of DVDSP 2 by Bruce Nazarian.

Bruce showed some things along the way of doing the Santa Cruz tutorial that really opened up my eyes to the true value of DVDSP 2.

The asset browser (forgot the real nameof it) is Powerful. The ease of building menu's is the power house of DVDSP 2 and the fact that you don't need to pre-build assets before starting to design the DVD is superior.

Most likely the only pre-build operation that you will still want to do it use the A-Pack encoder for really small audio files.

No more creating motion graphics to load into the menu. Drop Zones allows you to put any Quicktime clip into the menu just like iDVD does.

The Basic level interface looks like iDVD but the power of the Advanced interface and timeline is way better than iDVD.

DVDSP 2 looks to be a really awsome DVD production platform.

Bruce mentioned that DVDSP was most likely a recode of the Spruce DVD PC application.

I have had one report that SP 2 accepts SP 1.5 projects properly.

--ken

I want my DVDSP 2 ASAP COD, TGIF!!!!

ARRRGGHH!!!!

the local apple store is sold out of the upgrades!

After reading all the wonderful things about DVDSP 2.0, I don't wait on shipping.

I have finished all the tutorials. Creating stories in this is awesome. Okay, I am officially loving this upgrade! It is a must have.