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While there are a number of excellent CD/DVD authoring packages available, they are often targeted at the experienced user and have a high price point to match.  If you have neither the experience nor the necessary budget for such a product, then you will need to look elsewhere.  Ulead Systems, a 15-year veteran in the area of video, CD and DVD authoring software, understands your position and believes it can offer a solution.  In this case it is DVD Movie Factory 4 which is aimed at the enthusiastic amateur who wants to turn videos and photos into content for burning to optical media.  The product comes with the claim of being “the easy way to preserve memories on DVD”.

Movie Factory’s opening menu gives the user the choice of working with CD or DVD media.  As the mouse hovers over the two types of optical media icons, so the list of appropriate options will change.  For example with CD you can create a video or slideshow, copy a disk and transfer data straight to the media while DVD adds the ability to edit or add content to a DVD.  Whatever the choices of task, a wizard style approach will lead the user through the necessary steps to complete the process.

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When creating projects, the user can select from 4:3 or 16:9 wide screen mode before making use of content from various sources.  Images can be selected from the hard disk or removal media while video can be imported from DVD recorders or captured from either analogue or digital television as long as you have the necessary capture card.  There is also support for Dolby Digital audio when adding a commentary or backing music track with options for audio fade-in and out with user-definable time duration.

A number of transitional effects are supplied along with a new "pane & zoom" feature for use with slideshows.  The transitions and pan & zoom effects have been grouped into various categories which can be selected from a pick list.  However once a choice has been made, it will become the default for that slideshow without any variation.  There is no option to select individual effects for specific slides.  The best that can be managed is to select one of the transitions from the random category which alternatives between two effects.

I was slightly disappointed with the pan & zoom effect.  While it was initially  appealing as the focal point was moved in a chosen direction as each image was displayed, the effect soon began to wear thin as again there was no variation allowed.

Probably of more use to many users is the software’s ability to adjust the video data rate to fit the available disk space.  While you are advised as to the size of the project and how much disk space is available, it can be time consuming and frosting attempting manually to balance image quality against space available to achieve the optimum results.  It is far better to let the software do all the hard work for you.

Ulead has supplied 80 templates to help with the creation of title pages and menus to add a professional feel to work.  There is also a module for designing and printing disk labels and case covers.  A selection of templates is provided for this purpose and others can easily be created and saved.

Movie Factory 4 does tend to be a little on the slow side when switching between modules but otherwise is quite capable of producing some good results in an easy and friendly approach.  Pricing has been set at a very reasonable £24.99.  System requirements are a Pentium III 800MHz, 128MB of RAM, 950MB of hard disk space, DirectX 9.0 and Windows 98SE or later.

http://www.ulead.co.uk/dmf/runme.htm