Software Needed to Make Menus in FCPX

Fcpx is a video editor. It does not do dvd authorizing. Since the discontinuation of iDVD and DVD Studio Pro, I don't know of any apps, on Mac, that do what you want.

 

There are no good options for this on OS X. Apple's DVD authoring software DVD Studio Pro has been discontinued for years. iDVD was also discontinued. Adobe's Encore was discontinued with CS6.

You can burn a basic DVD with FCP X and Apple Compressor lets you make a few customizations but nothing like DVDSP or DVD Architect.

Roxio Toast Titanium let's you make some menu customization, but nothing like DVDSP.

Optical media is dying out, and authoring a DVD from HD material throws away 5/6th of the data. Authoring a DVD from 4k material throws away 96% of the data. See graphic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution

Non-optical alternatives include Youtube, Vimeo and video files on custom-printed USB sticks. Of course these don't have the menu-style presentation of DVD/Blu-Ray, but increasingly viewers use mobile devices, desktop computers or smart TVs which don't have optical playback anyway.

Vimeo Pro does have a "portfolio" feature which allows a basic customized layout for framing and presenting a video. Roku allows content creators to make their own private channels.

For DVD creation on OS X the best solution might be use Boot Camp and the DVD Lab Pro authoring software:

http://www.mediachance.com/dvdlab/dvdlabpro.html

 

you can still use old software like dvdstudio pro, encore cs6 or i dvd if you can find them. afaik, encore cs6 is the only one that can still be legally downloaded (if you own creative cloud, you can download premiere cs6 which includes encore - premiere can then be uninstalled again)

 

If you set and name chapter markers, FCP will use those as menu items when you share as a DVD. Just three or four simple menu formats are provided. Dunno what iMovie had built in. Not sure if there are third party add ons that provide different formats.

I keep my old MacPro loaded with DVDSP and other older tools around just for authoring and the like. Its nice to create DVD disk images to share with others so that their computer DVD players get the same menus and extra content/control as they would with physical DVDs.

But yes, optical DVDs seem to be becoming more and more abandoned.

 

Blu-Ray has poor market penetration and is on the way out: http://www.computerworld.com/articl...and-streaming-options-are-gaining-on-you.html

Admittedly there is no exact replacement for the optical disc presentation, with menus, splash screen, chapter markers, etc. However it doesn't really matter since increasingly end viewers don't even have optical drives. Few new laptops have them built in.

The functional successor to optical media is a web-based presentation, where your media is hosted on a site of your choice and the framing presentation is done via web design.

Oftentimes even higher-end professional web sites serve up their videos with fairly straightforward presentation -- no four-way cursors, no splash screen moving graphics, no multi-level menus, no moving backgrounds, no music, etc. E.g, videos on CNN.com are just a launching thumbnail and caption on a black screen. It still looks good and works well, so that's something to think about.

 

Part of the problem is a lack of open, available standards in authoring video material in these new formats.

E.g, if you buy and download a feature film through iTunes, some have very DVD-like presentations: splash screen, background music, "play", "extras", etc. However to my knowledge this is a closed, proprietary implementation that only exists within iTunes. You or I can't easily author a video with similar presentation and framing features in a vendor-independent distribution format. If anyone knows otherwise, I'd be interested in hearing more.

For most things it's sufficient to can just make the video, host it and have a web site with basic titles and thumbnails.

However it's logical to want the streaming equivalent of a DVD/Blu-Ray *and* similar ease of authoring, presentation and universal distribution. I don't think that yet exists, and it's a real deficiency.

 

You've already gotten your answers but I'll just add that for my business I've found Final Cut X's DVD exporter to be good enough for any DVDs I need to make these days.

I make a custom JPEG in Photoshop for the main DVD menu (with the title of the video on the JPEG in any font I want) and I make chapter marker in the video that get turned into a 'Chapters' menu automatically.

Between those two things I can give the client what they need, even if it's not as fancy as what I used to do with DVD Studio Pro.

On the one hand, it's a shame. On the other hand I now do in 5 minutes what used to take me an hour. (And the clients really don't care about the difference so I guess I'm really just saving 55 minutes I used to waste.)

So you take all that and add in the fact that only 10% of my clients even want DVDs at all and, well, you can start to see why Apple went the way they did.

 

Why Blu-ray? There are very few players that were bought, Playstation could play back, but with domestic burners you are limited to how much you can burn, the biggest draw back to Blu-ray and Steve Job's bag of hurt was the crappy cost of licensing rights, it was very very expensive to burn a batch of Blu-ray disks, hence many studios only put onto blu-ray high value movies.

Stick to dvd, any way, dvd and if you manage to get blu ray to work, it will be at best a high quality standard def version of your movie..

 

Yes, compressor makes a reasonably respectable looking DVD or Blu-Ray though with very limited options. It will obey chapter markers from FCPX but is limited to one feature per disc. (Toast will not obey FCPX chapter markers)

Encoding looks pretty good to me (much better than iDVD) and even does a good job of converting 1080i to something that looks properly smooth on a standard DVD.