The finished product
 

I made an attemt as this on another forum. Myabe I did not word it right, or ask the right questions. I have used what most would call the consumer grade software. Right now I use and love the Sony Movies studio Vegas 4.0 + DVD. I also downloaded the trial of DVD architect. Of course there is much more to this program, and at least some thing's faster to do. I was suprised how much alike the screen's look though. But to get to my question, talking finished product. How much better is the finished product from the $700 program compared to the $100 program? On the finished DVD what would stand out? I have been doing small side job's for people and would like to do more. But I just can't justify the purchase. What I have done has been well recieved and the people are blown away that I do it at home on my PC. Can anyone help clarify the comparison for me? Thanks.

The first thing (I think) that stand out on a DVD:

- the cover of the box
- the disc itself
- the menu system on the DVD

Then:

- the movie itself (story, way it was shot, acted, edited etc.)
- quality of the audio
- quality of the video

DVDA comes with the dolby digital AC3 encoder, so all audio encoding
should be okay as long as you have a good audio track to start
with.

The most obvious thing people will notice (besides your movie)
is the quality of the video. Although Vegas (and Premiere Pro)
both comes with a pretty decent encoder, there are better
MPEG-2 (the video format) encoders out there:

1. Canopus ProCoder. Seems to be the best that is currently available. It is not that expensive, the express version is even cheaper

2. TMPGEnc and CCE (CinemaCraft Encoder). The first is free/very cheap (and a very good encoder), the latter is very expensive (and very good as well)

So you might want to check out www.tmpgenc.net out
first. If you do a search here on DVi for TMPGenc & CCE & Procoder
you'll find various threads where I respond with links to guides as
well etc.

Hope this has helped some!