Hello All,
Ulead DVD MovieFactory 4 Disc Creator has less in common with the latest Roxio and Nero releases (which began life as disc-mastering apps) and more with Sonic Solutions' MyDVD product line. Both the Sonic MyDVD and Ulead offerings focus more on users who want to author and burn DVD-Video, Video CD, and Super Video CD projects and put less emphasis on peripheral functions like photo retouching and audio editing.
Disc Creator's task-oriented Launcher menu is functionally similar to Nero's and Roxio's front ends, but it's the details that make the difference. The slick animated Launcher displays menu choices on a glossy 3D desktop in fonts large enough to read from across a living room. Three oversized icons let you choose between CD, DVD, and Favorites task categories that include creating DVD-Video titles, recording live video direct-to-disc, and copying or editing an existing CD or DVD. Mousing over a menu entry displays an illustrated description, and clicking it pops up a submenu of more specific tasks. An adjacent 3D pane provides global access to utilities that display information about drives and media, launch a label-design application, and let you format, erase, and finalize discs. It's all as slick as can be and, unlike most suite launchers, places almost all functions exactly where you'd expect to find them.
Disc Creator also includes five Quick-Drop Box icons that provide even easier drag-and-drop access to tasks like playing media files, burning music, video, or data files, copying discs, and downloading content to a handheld media player or removable storage device. In each case, you simply drag files to the appropriate box and then click a Burn, Play, or Output button. You can also fine-tune job settings by double-clicking on a box to launch an appropriately configured suite application.
Like almost all mass-market video-production programs, Disc Creator's core DVD MovieFactory 4 module uses a wizard-like guided workflow to lead you through each phase of the authoring process. But unlike most of the competition, MovieFactory's elegant interface rarely forced us to hunt for common functions like setting the duration of a looping motion-menu background or extracting multiple clips from a video file. We were even more impressed with the program's wonderfully responsive scrubbing controls and oversized preview window, which made it a pleasure to navigate footage with SMPTE time-code–resolution precision.
MovieFactory's comprehensive import options let you mix different-format video files stored on local, networked, and removable storage devices. It can extract content from DVD-Video, DVD-VR, DVD+VR, and DVD-RAM discs and can record live video direct-to-disc without storing it on your hard drive.
Like MyDVD 6, MovieFactory's video-editing tools aren't nearly as powerful as those of Roxio's VideoWave 7 module, lacking luxuries like multitrack timeline editing and video overlay capabilities. Nonetheless, there's enough there to satisfy casual users primarily interested in tasks like splicing, trimming, and merging clips, making simple video-quality adjustments, and adding no-frills titles and soundtracks.
The program's authoring capabilities are in the same class. MovieFactory 4 provides a great-looking selection of widescreen and full-screen menu templates, simple PowerPoint-like click-and-type text entry, and the ability to create moving menu backgrounds and button labels. But it offers a significantly different tool set than MyDVD 6, allowing you, for example, to move and resize any object on a menu but permitting sub-menus only when they're used to select video chapters. It provides only rudimentary text font management tools, has no facilities for aligning or layering menu objects, and doesn't let you create subtitle tracks.
The suite's other core module is Burn.Now, a drag-and-drop data/music disc-mastering application much like Nero Burning ROM, Sonic Solutions' RecordNow!, and Roxio's Creator Classic. Despite its relatively late appearance, Burn.Now matches the competition in most ways and includes handy features like the ability to automatically transcode content when creating MP3, WMA, or Red Book audio CDs from multiple types of audio sources. It can also produce audio-only DVD-Video discs that are compatible with all types of DVD players. Rounding out the suite is the excellent Ulead DVD Player utility. There's also a pair of copy modules that lack Nero's MPEG-4 support but offer most of the other title-editing, compression, and copying capabilities that the equivalent Nero and Roxio components provide.
DVD MovieFactory is no substitute for standalone video production programs like Pinnacle Studio 9, and it doesn't attempt to match the breadth of general-purpose suites like Nero and Roxio. But its terrific interface and intelligently chosen feature set make it our top choice for users who want to create straightforward video and slide show discs quickly.
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Donnie Hoover
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