DVD Architect Studio 4.5 Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This program does not come with a fancy video editor nor is it a suite of tools. That's why you get more bang for the buck. If you already have other tools, such as Sonic EMC or Premiere Elements you get video editors and other tools, but neither of those create the DVD as well as DVD Architect.
For example, Premiere Elements allows you to create automatically chaptered movies by allowing you to but chapter marks in the movie editor, but it does not allow you to create a DVD with more than one movie. It has a nice video editor, but a very weak DVD authoring tool. Sonic EMC allows multiple movies and slide shows, but does not create chapter marked movies.
DVD Architect allows both and a lot more. You add setups for sound tracks and easily create a tree of menus of practically any structure you want.
You can access DVD virtual commands in a limited way through the scripting tool. It could be better in that area.
If you buy Vegas Pro 8, you get DVD Architect with it and you have a great deal more power than any of the lowest price Video/DVD authoring combos.
I chose Vegas Pro 8 with DVD Architect because I was looking for a mid-priced tool (half the price of Premiere Pro), which is far more versatile than the low end packages. Although it may not be as powerful as Premiere Pro or Mac's Final Cut, it does a great job and you don't have to pay $800 for Premiere Pro.
I would have liked Premier Pro, but it was too expensive for me PLUS it does not yet support AVCHD files from my camcorder.
Sonic advertises support for AVCHD in Roxio Creator 2009, but what they really did was add a converter, which converts all the clips from your camera to mpg files, since the video editor "VideoWave" has not been changed to handle native AVCHD. Each step of conversion is a loss in quality. Sonic EMC also does a very sloppy job of batch processing the files so you can't walk away and just let it convert everything. You must select a folder every time it finishes a clip. Having 30 years of programming experience, that could have been done better by simply modifying the batch loop.
I still like the Sonic suite because it has a lot of useful tools that are not included with these other programs.
If you have an earlier Sonic Video Wave or EMC 8 or 9 and don't want to spend the money, you might find an AVCHD converter online for free or very cheap, which essentially accomplishes the same thing.
Bottom line: You get what you pay for and when you hold your budget, you have to compromise one thing for another.

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