Sigma Designs has begun shipping Sonic’s DVDit! LE authoring software with Sigma’s REALmagic DVR, a complete DVD/MPEG-2 encoding and playback card. REALmagic DVR enables Windows NT users to capture, edit, author and publish video on DVD as well as play DVD-Video content.

“We selected DVDit! LE to bundle with REALmagic DVR because of its ease-of-use, extensive feature set and its power to turn DVR’s high-quality MPEG-2 video into DVDs that can play back on any set-top DVD player or DVD-equipped PC,” said Marshall Goldberg, director of Marketing at Sigma Designs. “Our collaboration with Sonic Solutions allows us to deliver a complete DVD publishing system for under $1,000.”

To create a DVD title, video is captured and compressed into MPEG-2 using REALmagic DVR. Users then drag-and-drop their compressed video and audio clips, graphics, backgrounds and buttons into DVDit! LE to build an interactive DVD. With a single mouse click, all video and audio content is converted into DVD-Video format and written to DVD-R, CD-R using the new cDVD format, DVD-RAM or hard disk. When combined with a DVD-RAM drive, REALmagic DVR adds powerful and inexpensive DVD-Video production and high quality digital video archival capabilities to standard Windows NT. The suggested retail price for the REALmagic DVR is $999 U.S.