DVD Studio Pro 1.5

Rating:
Summary: Best DVD Authoring App on Market!!!
Review: I've been authoring DVDs for years. I started off using Sonic Solutions authoring suite. We paid almost $... for this system in 1997. And SOnic only runs in OS9. Now you can have all that functionality for only $... with DVD Studio Pro. DVD Studio Pro 1.5 offers welcome improvements such as OS X compatibility, more-reliable previews, higher MPEG-2 compression quality, and tighter integration with Final Cut Pro 3, and the program remains the only viable choice for professional DVD authoring on the Mac. But Apple needs to deliver another version that improves usability, the bit-budgeting process, and documentation, so that new users can get up-to-speed faster and experienced users can work more efficiently. If you are serious about making DVDs, I suggest you have a dedicated machine for DVD Studio Pro. Once you start installing games and weird shareware apps, you will have issues with crashing and such. Bottom Line: This is a great application for a pro user and does everything "high end" systems like Sonic does, but better. Nice work Apple!

Rating:
Summary: A poorly conceived product
Review: If you have a Mac, you really have no choice, this is all there is, and that's a shame. After using this program for the past month, I am considering buying a PC, and throwing away my Mac. It's that bad. Where Final Cut Pro shines, DVD Studio Pro [is not good]. If you do buy this software, be sure and buy Martin Sitter's excellent how-to book, as the slim provided manual tells you nothing. Martin Sitter's book will have you turning out DVD's in no time, provided you don't do something crazy like try to create a disc with subtitles.
This software is incredibly buggy. It crashes constantly. The Subtitle Editor (STE) is worse than useless, it is a crime against all of us who purchased this. Apple should be sued.
The STE uses non-drop-frame timecode, while the rest of the software demands you use dropframe (or else your audio won't synchronize properly). This leads to horrible build conflicts when chapter markers and subtitles are used together. (Unless you don't care if your audio is synced.)
Did I mention the crashes? The Apple DVD player is worthless, it won't even play commercial DVD's without crashing. Then there problems with DVD-9 layer breaks - I haven't tried building a DVD-9 yet, but I'm not looking forward to it, based on what I've read online. This program should not be sold as it is.