DVD MovieFactory

Ulead is a company that has been around in the digital video editing arena for already a long time and they offer a wide range of software products. DVD MovieFactory is their entry-level DVD authoring program. It is not as advanced as demanding users may want, but for an average user it offers sufficient possibilities to create nice looking DVD's. Furthermore it is easy to use and attractively priced.

1. Two versions

Ulead offers two versions of the product. The Standard Edition and the Disc Creator Edition. The extra features offered by the Disc Creator Edition are:

• Dolby Digital Encoding (AC3)
• DVD-VR support
• Data CD/DVD and audio CD creation

When installing the Disc Creator Edition, the program folder will contain a separate program called Ulead Bur.Now for creation of data or audio discs. In this review we will only concentrate on DVD authoring. Having said that, both versions of the program can also create VCD and SVCD.

2. Features

When starting the program a window will appear from which you can select what you want to do. We will only look at the following sections in this review:

• Create Video Disc: this will take you to the section to author DVD's from scratch
• Create Slideshow Disc: through this section you can create Picture DVD's and VCD's.
• Direct to Disc: this will let you record 'directly ' from a camcorder to a disc.
• Edit disc: selecting this item lets you edit the contents of an existing DVD

3. Create a DVD from scratch

This is the main feature of the program. The workflow is organized in a four-page wizard. The first page is used to collect the base material for the DVD, do some simple editing and define chapters.

Capturing

When a digital camcorder is connected, this is automatically recognized; device control over Firewire is also available. The program also detected the TV tuner card and webcam on my test system. When capturing to AVI any codec as installed on the system can be used. The program can also use its built in encoder contains an mpeg encoder so that the video can be captured "directly" to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2. I write "directly" because encoding is not done real time; the program creates a file on the hard drive that serves as buffer to store frames when the system is not fast enough to encode incoming frames. This is a very nice solution, because this allows the program to create the highest possible quality which is not limited by the speed of the system.

Adding other content

Of course you can also add files from your hard disk. All common video formats are accepted without any problems. Nice features are that you can also add a slideshow (see section 5) and video files that are already burned on a DVD (see section 6).

Editing

The program also contains some editing possibilities. These include trimming, inserting transitions, overlay of texts and adding audio tracks. For transitions, the program even includes a complete scene detection mechanism to detect change form one scene to another. However, the editing possibilities are very limited and the way they are implemented is rather unconventional. Unless you don't feel like using a separate editing program to do a little more sophisticated editing, it will be of very limited use. More of interest is of course the possibility to create chapter points. This is done by moving to the required position in the preview window and add a chapter point at that location.

Creating the menu

Now let's have a look at the real important part of a DVD authoring program: creating menus and a navigation structure. This is done using the second screen of the wizard. Authoring in DVD MovieFactory ic completely template based. The templates consist of standard lay-outs, backgrounds, navigational buttons and frames. By combining different elements you can create the menu's according to your likings. Furthermore you have the option to use your own images as background and add your own files as background audio for the menu's. Texts on the menu are editable and you can use your own fonts and colors. A real limitation in the program is that a button to start a movie is always a frame containing an image of the video file itself. You can not use a button or any other object to start a movie. Nice feature is that you can create a motion menu, meaning that the movie can play inside the frame (however for only 10, 20 or 30 seconds). If you created chapters in a title, you have the option to create a separate menu that will serve as a scene selection menu.

All in all, the template system makes DVD MovieFactory very easy to use. Downside is that it certainly limits its possibilities.

Preview and burning

The last two screens in the wizard are for preview and burning. In the preview window you can check how the DVD is going to look like and test the navigational structure. The last window is reserved for burning the disc. In stead of burning you can also save it as an image or as a set of file so that you can burn it at a later time using your own preferred burning program.

Encoding

Of course, a very important feature in any authoring program that will determine the quality of the DVD is the encoder (at least, if you don't feed files that are already MPEG-2 encoded). The encoder is of a pretty decent quality and offers the possibility to set both video and audio bitrate. Both constant and variable bitrate can be used.

4. The Direct to Disc option

The option Direct to Disc suggests that footage captured from your camera (or other source) is directly recorded to DVD. This is not the case. When you select this option you can set a number parameters, like whether you want to use a menu and if you want add chapter points at scene change positions. After you have made all the settings you start by recording your footage. This will first be transferred to your hard drive for further processing. Once that is done, the DVD will automatically be recorded.

5. Create Slideshow Discs

Another nice feature of DVD MovieFactory is that you can create slideshow discs. A DVD slideshow disc is basically the same as a normal Video-DVD. The movie itself just consists of a series of still images, possibly with transitions in between and audio underneath. You can create exactly the same by placing stills on the timeline of a video editing program, export the result to a video file and use that in an authoring program to burn a DVD.

DVD MovieFactory has the option to automate that whole process by a couple of simple mouse clicks:

• add a number of still images
• define the duration that the images will be shown (same duration for each of the images)
• define the transition between the images (either the same for each image or at random)

You can place multiple slideshows to one DVD and author the DVD using menu's to access the slideshows. You can also mix normal video with slideshows in DVD MovieFactory.

6. Edit disc

This sound more promising that it actually is. It suggests that you can open a disc, making changes and save it back to disc. What actually happens is that all of the titles will be extracted from the DVD to separate mpeg-files and copied to hard disk. Once that is done, you end up in the normal authoring module with each of the mpeg-files as a new title. The menu screens and navigational data is lost. Anyway, it can be useful to extract the mpeg-files from an existing DVD. The video is not re-encoded so you will end up with the original quality as it was on the disc.