minerva impression - part 2

Emedia Professional, Feb, 1999 by Jan Ozer

Editor's Note: This is the second in a five-part series of reviews of DVD authoring systems developed and distributed with the corporate user in mind. The preceding Optibase review, as well as future reviews in this series, will focus on mainstream authoring software systems best-suited to DVD title development for sales, training, and promotional purposes.

as DVD-Video players move into the mainstream, and DVD-R prices continue to drop, DVD authoring systems for business-related applications will become increasingly popular. Eventually, these systems will be generating DVD titles to replace or enhance today's PowerPoint presentations, creating, for example, titles that sales reps can demonstrate on their DVD-enabled sales laptops or portable DVD players and leave for customers to play on their console DVD players.

Traditionally, DVD authoring systems have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and required one or more technicians--a factor that clearly won't drive a corporate mass market. The focus here, then, is primarily on ease-of-use and affordability--both necessary components to growth in corporate DVD use.

Unlike Optibase's DVD Fab! XPress--a comprehensive MPEG-2/AC-3 encoding/authoring bundle featuring Daikin's Scenarist Basic--Minerva Impression is a much simpler, $9,995 authoring program without encoding capabilities. Overall, Impression is a refreshing step in the right direction. An easy-to-use program requiring minimal DVD-specific knowledge, Impression is easily capable of producing simple DVD titles and provides full production capabilities. If you can work around some annoying usability quirks and asset compatibility issues, Impression is a great choice for most simple corporate applications.

Designed primarily for the corporate market, Impression does not support all DVD features. Noteworthy omissions include multiangle videos, multistory (e.g., director's cut) videos, parental management, dual-layer DVDs, and karaoke. Impression also lacks encryption support, making it unsuitable for commercial titles. More relevant for corporations, Impression doesn't support slide shows with audio or player register programming, preventing the creation of training exercises that force users to answer a question correctly to view subsequent videos.

On the other hand, the program does support multiple language and subtitle tracks, and generally all features necessary to build corporate sales, presentation, and simple training videos for output to DVD-R, DLT, or hard drive. In short, Impression can handle the best features of PowerPoint, plus a little more, including the ability to create a presentation that will play on a DVD player without a computer.

Of course, you'll have to encode your audio/video assets with another program, since Impression doesn't provide either function. Uniquely, however, Impression lets you author with the more easily obtained AVI/MOV file types, and then substitute the actual DVD assets for these proxy files at the end of the process.

first impressions

Impression's basic interface has three windows: a timeline on top, a template window for menu assets on the lower left, and an edit/simulation window in the lower right corner. Within this structure, Impression works with four main building blocks: Books, Titles, Chapters, and an optional Introduction.

To accommodate DVD's structured format, Impression has strict rules governing the use of these components. While seemingly arbitrary, they're not really that difficult, and understanding these rules will help you comprehend the simplicity of Impression's development structure.

Impression's Chapters contain all individual assets like audio, video, and subtitles. Impression's Titles contain up to 99 Chapters, while each DVD project can contain up to 99 Titles spread over any amount of Books. Generally, you'll only use multiple Books when you need to mix MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 content, or NTSC and PAL materials. In contrast, you'll probably use multiple Titles to break Chapters into logical sections, or when you have more than 99 Chapters. Chapters can hold one video or still image asset and up to eight audio tracks or 32 subtitle tracks. This means that Impression can't create slide shows comprised of multiple slides and one audio track--probably the most significant limitation of the product for corporate users.

You can break one Chapter into multiple Chapters, creating, for example, different entry points into one longer clip. If desired, this clip can play seamlessly through the Chapter marks if uninterrupted by the viewer. In contrast, a short moment of black screen and silence will always interrupt the playback of separate clips contained in consecutive Chapters.

Books, Titles, and Chapters are created and deleted on the timeline using simple right mouse click commands. However, because the timeline contains all these components longitudinally, branched playback schemes aren't graphically displayed, which can get confusing, since all you see is one long timeline.