EditGroove Software today announces the release of the DVD Bit Budget Assistant(TM), a professional, fully-featured video “bit budgeting” utility for the iPhone. It is also designed with Educational users in mind.

“How much stuff can I fit onto my Video DVD?”
“What bitrates should I encode in Apple’s Compressor, for DVD Studio Pro?”
“Can you help me make sense of all this?”
Those are never-ending questions, since creating a Video DVD can be an arcane process, and often involves finding one’s way through a complex Excel spreadsheet.
What is Bit Budgeting?
Quantity versus Quality: That’s it, the basic set of trade-offs facing anyone creating today’s optical video media.

Bit Budgeting is an integral part of that planning — it’s the process of choosing a balance between how much and what kinds of program material (“assets”) you want to include on your Disc, vs. what you can “afford” based on the room available.

The DVD Bit Budget Assistant makes this process far more easy, and even fun. It’s a more portable, interactive alternative for experimenting with these “what-if” bit budgeting scenarios, in the form of a pocket-sized brainstorming tool that you can always carry with you.

The application has been carefully and thoughtfully designed to be useful both to Professionals already working in the industry — especially those who aren’t content to rely on the usual cookie-cutter assumptions — as well as Students of film, video and digital media.
Benefits:
* Easily and quickly run through numerous “what-if” planning scenarios, interactively, in the palm of your hand.
* Learn more about the DVD format, and gain a more intuitive understanding of the trade-offs inherent in producing today’s optical video media.
* Keep your video looking its best.
Features:
* Five standard DVD capacities (DVD-5, -9, -10, -14, -18)
* Total program durations up to 10 hours
* Up to 5 soundtracks of each of the three most common formats (AC-3, DTS, PCM), with configurable bitrate for each format
* Up to 10 subtitle tracks (also with configurable bitrate)
* Ability to set aside up to 4GB for DVD-“ROM” content
* Colorful “Vid-O-Meter”(TM) shows immediate feedback, with average bitrate of resulting video
* Special excerpt explaining Bit Budgeting in layman’s terms, from classic video/film textbook “Nonlinear”
* Detailed Help screen, which explains all functions
* Plus: web links to authoritative third-party resources

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Minimum requirements
– The DVD Bit Budget Assistant runs on iPhone and iPod Touch, OS 2.0 or later.
– Requires 0.8 MB.

Price and availability
– List price is $3.99 USD; with a special introductory price of $1.99 USD for a limited time.
– Available now on the iPhone App Store.
About EditGroove
EditGroove is a Los Angeles-based supplier of mobile & desktop software solutions, and video post-production editorial services. Its first product was UserMatic(TM), a critically-acclaimed user preferences management utility for Apple’s Final Cut Pro.
It was founded in 2008 by veteran Los Angeles video editor Ron Diamond. He is also known for having co-written, with author and former Lucasfilm evangelist Michael Rubin, the book “NONLINEAR: A Field Guide to Digital Video and Film Editing” (4th ed.).