Roxio Toast vs. iMovie/iDVD

[Argelius]

I'm in the process of completing my transition from PC to Mac.

I've been looking at Roxio Toast and am curious what functionality (new or enhanced) it adds to Mac's iDVD and iMovie?

(There's no demo version to download, so I cant quite figure out what it does).

 

[OryHara]

toast burns image files in addition to movies

if you want to make nice looking DVD menus then you have to use iDVD, and toast dosnt edit video, so you'll probably want to use iMovie too

 

[BornAgainMac]

You can use iMovie to create a movie that will play on a regular CD using Toast that will play in your DVD player. Also toast will accept MPEG-1 movies as input but iDVD doesn't.

iDVD will make better looking DVDs.

 

[Counterfit]

Toast and iMovie/iDVD perform two different tasks, so you can't really compare them. If you just want some pre-made video clips with a basic menu, you can use Toast. But if you want to make home movies, and present them in the best way possible (within reason ), you would use iMovie/iDVD. Also, Toast does many things mentioned already, such as imaging, copying, and mounting of images in formats not usually supported in Disk Utility (such as bin/cue).

 

[Argelius]

Thanks for your responses: here's a specific thing I'm hoping to do...

I'm looking for a Mac photoslide show program that can do the following:

[1] Create slide show "movies" using transitions and the Ken Burns effect

[2] Write these slide shows to DVD with compatibility in most DVD players

[3] Allow adding of an mp3 to cover a given number of slides.

I know the first two items are not a problem to find. The last one, however, I had a hard time finding when I was in the Window$ world.

What I want to do is select, for instance 20 slides in the show and add a music clip for that span of slides, and have that clip fade/or end when that range of slides has ended. I know some programs will stretch the duration of the slides to fill the length of the mp3 -- I want the music clip to end when the selected group of slides finishes (without altering the preset slide durations).

 

[Counterfit]

Sounds like iPhoto -> iDVD would work for that. Of course, you can tweak the timing in iMovie if you want.

 

[live4ever]

IMovie/iDVD will do all that.

But Toast is well worth the price if you burn more than audio CDs and the occational iDVD.

Its the one piece of software that I use everyday and if you are used to Nero/Alcohol on the PC then Toast should be the first software on your list.

Highest recommendation for Toast if you're still not sure it is worth the registration price.

 

[Argelius]

Thanks, all, for your thoughts!

I think I copy of Toast will be in my future.