LaCie confirmed today that DVD Studio Pro 1.1, Appleis complete DVD Production Solution, supports LaCieis new FireWire DVD/CD Rewritable Drive. Combined, the products enable Mac users to create professional-looking DVD projects, preview them, web-enable them, and burn them to DVD-R General discs without having to learn complex DVD authoring commands. The recorded videos are compatible with most of the DVD drives and TV settop video players in use today.
With DVD Studio Pro support for the LaCie DVD/CD Rewritable Drives, Apple resellers can offer a complete desktop DVD authoring and burning solution for less than $2,000. The LaCie drive, which is equipped with a 400 Mbps FireWire interface, and the DVD video application package can be quickly and easily integrated with new or existing Mac systems to stimulate new sales as well as after-market sales.
DVD Studio Pro provides users with the ability to create full-featured DVDs, with high-quality audio and video and sophisticated navigation. To convert the DV files to the DVD format, DVD Studio Pro includes a software-based MPEG-2 encoding capability that eliminates the need for expensive encoding hardware. DVD projects can include motion or still menus, up to 99 video tracks (each with chapter markers, multiple stories, up to nine different angles, eight audio streams, and up to 32 subtitle streams), slide shows, and multiple language tracks. With the softwareis real-time MPEG preview capabilities, users can see exactly how the video will look on a TV set or a VGA screen as it is being encoded. Thereis no need to create a disc image or wait for multiplexing.
Scott Phillips, President of LaCie, pointed out that with the ability to use a single drive for storing data, video and audio storage on DVDs and CDs, the LaCie DVD/CD Rewritable Drive also provides users with a substantial savings and added convenience. "Users can switch from DVD technology to CD technology and from write-once to rewritable simply by inserting the preferred disc," he noted.
For small-scale distribution and the widest range of playback options, including new and legacy DVD-ROM drives, DVD players and DVD recorders, the drive records to 4.7GB DVD-R General Use discs at 2x (2.6 MB/sec) speed. The high-capacity, write-once DVD General media also provides users with the assurance that their videos cannot be altered or erased. Videos and other large files that may require editing can be recorded to 4.7GB DVD-RW media. The LaCie drive reads DVD-R, DVD-Video and DVD ROM discs at 6x (7.8 MB/sec). With 4.7GB DVD-R and DVD-RW media, users can store up to 14 hours of MP3 audio, two hours of theater-quality video, 4,700 color photos or more than 500,000 documents.
Users also have the flexibility to store smaller files on low-cost 700MB CD-Rs at 8x speed or on CD-RW discs at 4x speed. CD playback is at 24x. With standard 650MB CD-R and CD-RW media, users can store up to 650 color photos, 30 minutes of MPEG-2 video, 4 hours of MP3-compressed audio or up to 50,000 documents on a single disc.
LaCieis FireWire DVD/CD Rewritable Drive is available for US$999. You can find more information at the LaCie Web site.