Pro Editing @ Home

by Kevin P McAuliffe
January 9, 2009

The best CD/DVD burning application for the Mac has just taken it to the next level. With MacWorld 2009, Roxio released Toast 10 Titanium regular and Pro edition for the Mac. I reviewed Toast 9 Titanium about a year ago for DMN, and when I was approached to review the latest version I wasn’t sure what Roxio would bring to the table this year, but let me say, I was very, very impressed.

INSTALLATION

Toast 10 Titanium is about the easiest program to install. Whether you purchase online or purchase a physical copy, it’s a simple drag and drop into your applications folder, and your are all set to go. The installation should take no longer than about two minutes.

 

WHAT’S NEW

Most people are familiar with the “standard” Toast lineup, but this year there have been a few very welcome additions to the features in Toast 10 Titanium.

 

SAVING WEB VIDEO

Do you love those videos on You Tube, or any other video sharing site? Now you can download them, and flip them over to a format of your liking. The best part of this feature is that you don’t actually even have to do anything to download the videos. All you have to do is open the “Media Viewer”, and any video that is loaded up in your browser is automatically added to the viewer. Now, I can flip the file over to any format I want, or even burn a DVD of the movie. Awesome! Something to keep in mind is that not all formats are supported, and Toast does not support the converting of protected content.

AUDIOBOOK CONVERSION

Do you like to listen to Audiobooks on CD? Would you rather listen to them on your iPod? No problem! Simply convert the CD to an iTunes audiobook file (.m4b), and it Toast will retain all your chapter markers as well as give you support for pause/continue and playback speed adjustments.

DVD VIDEO CLIP EXTRACTION

Are you like me, and work with producers and directors that need to pull clips off of DVD’s, but you don’t have a bridge device to convert from a DVD player to FireWire? Toast 10 let’s you extract individual clips for a DVD, then convert it to your desired file type.

EVEN MORE DVD MENUS

If you like creating your DVD’s right from Toast, then you’re going to like that Roxio has added more than twenty new DVD and Blu-Ray menus in both standard and wide-screen formats.

 

AVCHD ARCHIVE

If you have a Camcorder that records in the AVCHD format, you can now archive your entire camera to disk quick and easy with Toast 10. You can even play back your archived DVD on a Blu-ray player in true HD. Nice!

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