During a recent meeting in Apple s midtown Manhattan office, EMedia Magazine was able to get the skinny on the new products. Apple has announced new Power Mac G4 systems, which will include Apple s new omniwriting SuperDrive, as well as its iDVD mastering software. Its baseline audience is prosumers who desire to replace their aging VHS tape collections with DVDs. A firmware upgrade expected later this year will also supply write compatibility with rewritable DVD-RW media. The bundled software, iDVD, is a simplified DVD mastering application designed for users who are inexperienced with the DVD authoring process.
Users can also design their own custom interfaces.
The software supports up to six buttons on the main menu, and any of the buttons can also be a folder that leads to another six-button menu. Before burning to a disc, a user can preview a project to test navigation and flow. Up to one hour of video can be stored on a single DVD-R disc. We feel that this gives consumers a realistic option when choosing to output video on DVD as opposed to VHS, where there are issues of lower quality and durability, says Mike Evangelist, senior product manager of DVD products at Apple. But Apple s emerging DVD strategy encompasses more than facile hobbyist encodes and burns.