Visual Fire, a convergent media solutions provider, has installed DVDConductor from Spruce Technologies, a web-enabled DVD authoring system. The company is using DVDConductor to develop powerful new direct marketing tools for its customers that combine the interactivity of Internet e-commerce with the rich media of DVD.

Visual Fire, which has been delivering high-level integrated products since it opened more than one year ago, combines elements of the Internet, CDROM, print, animation and video in its projects. “DVD is a natural choice for development and distribution of high quality convergent media products,” says Sonny Dixon, Vice President/General Manager, Visual Fire. “Of all the DVD authoring manufacturers we evaluated, Spruce was the one that stood out for its forward-looking approach to integrating web-based and DVD-based content. Spruce has made its Convergence web-enabling tools and the DVDonCD technology integral parts of its authoring systems. These two tools alone have opened a world of possibilities for Visual Fire in creating direct mail distribution products for our customers that interact with up-to-the minute web content. Of course, these tools are made even better because they are attached to a world class DVD authoring system. This powerful package from Spruce enables us to use DVD to differentiate Visual Fire from the crowd.”

Many Visual Fire customers are companies that aggressively embrace leading-edge technology in their marketing strategies, including Starwood Properties, Motorola, Sony, Disney, GHWine.com, FoodTrader.com, CatalinaLighting.com, UOL.com, Furnitureshoppers.com, Alimente.com, Officebuyers.com, Discovery Latin America and many others.

Visual Fire uses a turnkey Spruce DVDStation-CX(TM) — a complete DVD encoding and authoring solution that integrates Spruce’s robust, mainstream professional authoring system, DVDConductor, with Spruce’s industry-leading MPX-3000 hardware encoder in a high-performance Windows NT computer. The included Spruce Convergence is the only marketplace-proven Web-DVD solution that takes just seconds to implement and delivers foolproof, installation-free playback of titles that merge the rich media experience of DVD with the interactivity of the Internet. When used with Spruce’s included DVDonCD(TM) technology and free distribution, Convergence-Enabled WebDVD player, producers can create discs that play on virtually any of the over 200,000,000 CD-ROM and DVD-ROM equipped Windows PCs installed today without any additional specialized hardware or software.