Daikin may be more familiar to some as the producer of Scenarist, a high-end professional package which has been used in the authoring of many major blockbusters. ReelDVD is its entry-level DVD authoring solution that tries to cross the boundary of professional quality and compatibility for a wider market.

Apart from creating DVDs with menus, submenus, buttons and chapter points, ReelDVD provides the ability to create slide and still shows. These comprise a series of still images with the option of audio or as an interactive still show with no audio.

For the authoring of corporate presentations or videos, an adequate set of tools are included with ReelDVD, including up to 999 static or motion menus, multilanguage audio and subtitles (up to three channels each) and support for Dolby Digital.

ReelDVD will only accept DVD-compliant MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video formats, so before you start your project youll need to have all your video assets encoded into DVD-ready streams such as mpv, mpg, m2v and mp2. Audio files can be imported in one of three forms, either being Dolby Digital with an AC3 extension, Linear PCM Elementary Stream format with WAV or AIFF extensions or an MPEG 48kHz stereo audio file (PAL only). A nice feature of ReelDVD, especially if youre short of space, is that it can encode PCM and MPEG audio files (which need to be 16-bit stereo sampled at 48kHz) as two-channel Dolby Digital (AC3).

Theres no support for analog (Macrovision) or digital (CSS) copy protection, dual-layer DVDs, 16:9 aspect ratio (widescreen), hybrid DVDs or DLT drives. The lack of support for DLT in this version is a major issue, as its basically limiting your output to DVD-R or CD-R. This is fine for small print-runs, but as many production houses will not accept DVD-R as a master for manufacturing, larger runs will be a problem as burning a DVD-R is time consuming, cost prohibitive and not all DVD players will run them.

The interface of ReelDVD is a slick and professional-looking 32-bit application, which with the use of the quick-start tutorial provided within the manual shouldnt pose too many problems for anyone with or without knowledge of DVD authoring.

The interface consists of three main window areas: the Storyboard Area, Track Editor and Preview window. The storyboard area is the main authoring environment where via drag and drop all the video, audio, still image and sub-picture assets are added to your project.

Once youve dropped all of your assets onto the Storyboard you can adjust track timelines as well as add/delete chapter points, audio and sub-picture streams and set language attributes in the Track Editor window.

The Preview window is used for a number of functions, including editing the size and location of menu buttons and the path between them. The program flow, subtitle appearance and placement can also be tested and previewed to ensure that everything is running in order.

The process of creating links between assets and the interactivity of your DVD is undertaken in the Storyboard area, and is based on the concept of flowcharts with all links dragged out from icons representing your menus and video content. Each link has colour-coded directional arrows, depending on whether its a menu link, previous, next or return track link. This allows for quick and easy authoring of most projects, especially as you can base them on your pre-designed paper flowchart. For more complex projects, however, the Storyboard area can become overcrowded and complex with a swathe of assets, menus and coloured links.

ReelDVD supports chapter points within assets, but unfortunately doesnt support the ability to link to them from menus. So to create interactive menus linking to various time-points within your DVD youll have to break your video content down into clips which can be linked together in the authoring process.

Creating a menu, whether static or motion, with ReelDVD is again simple. All you need to do is import your menu background (either a BMP, JPEG, PICT, TIFF or Photoshop file for static menus or MPEG-1/2 for motion menus) onto the Storyboard and then drop your sub-picture (buttons) onto your Menu Background icon on the Storyboard. These can then be edited and linked to your various assets in the Preview window. The only limitation is that all sub-pictures are restricted to 16 colours.

Once youre happy with your project its easy to create your Video_ts folder and then either create an image or write directly to DVD-R. If you want to write your project to CD youll have to use the third-party software, NTI CD-Maker which comes bundled with ReelDVD.

ReelDVD is well presented and most people should be able to get to grips with the interface and start authoring their content relatively quickly. Its an excellent tool for corporate presentations and simple home videos. But if youre looking to produce high-quality DVD video for production or even produce a hybrid DVD with video and software content, youll find that the feature set is sorely lacking.