Ulead DVD Movie Factory 4

Price: £24.99
Overall rating: **** (4 out of 5)
Manufacturer: Ulead
Ulead DVD Movie Factory... £19.99
Ulead DVD MovieFactory 4 £28.99
Ulead DVD MovieFactory 4... £42.99
Ken McMahon, Personal Computer World 27 Jul 2005

Most budget video-editing programs now provide some DVD authoring tools, so dedicated authoring applications need to offer something extra. Ulead's DVD Movie Factory 4 offers ease of use and the ability to get video from a variety of sources - files from your hard drive, camcorder footage and digital TV recordings - onto your discs with the minimum of fuss.

Movie Factory uses a tabbed, wizard-style interface, which guides you through the DVD production process. First, a launch screen presents the various project options, which include Create Video DVD, Create Slideshow DVD, Copy disc, Straight to Disc and Edit DVD. Similar options are provided for CD-based projects.

As well as producing standalone slideshows, the package lets you incorporate them within a DVD-video project. Movie Factory's tools for assembling shows - sorting images, adding transitions and arranging backing music - were always good. This version adds new pan and zoom effects so that even still images can be given a more dynamic feel.

Straight to Disc is perfect for instant archival of a DV tape. All you need to do is connect your camcorder with a Firewire cable, insert a blank or editable DVD in the drive and hit the button. It's just a shame that this new version's support for 16:9 widescreen format video doesn't extend to this feature. If you have a camcorder capable of shooting in 16:9 format, you'll have to capture and author manually.

Convenient as Straight to Disc is, most people will opt for the more hands-on approach. The first step here is to import your source clips by capturing from a DV camcorder or analogue TV tuner or by locating files on your hard drive.

Captured footage can be encoded on the fly - this saves you having to do it later, prior to DVD burning - and the mpeg2 encoding options have been expanded, with new quality presets, 16:9 formats and Dolby Digital Stereo audio encoding.

It's not up to the standards of a dedicated video editor, but Movie Factory has all the basic tools for editing and organising clips into a format for DVD viewing.

The Multi-trim window makes light work of cutting unwanted footage, allowing you to scan through a clip using VCR-style controls and a jog slider, marking sections of the clip you want to keep and discarding the rest.

The add/edit chapter feature is used to add chapter points to longer clips and create sub-menus for them. You can add chapters manually - a preview window, VCR-style controls and a jog wheel let you skip through a clip adding chapters as you go. You can either create chapter points at fixed time intervals or where Movie Factory automatically detects scene changes.

The Enhance video feature lets you add transitions between clips, superimpose title overlays and record and mix voiceover narration and background music tracks. These features make the program a good choice for those who don't own a video-editing application but still want some creative editing control.

Having organised and edited your content, Movie Factory's menu editor puts it into a default template, with thumbnails to link clips to chapter menus and navigation buttons to move between menu pages. A selection of templates is organised into categories such as corporate, vacation, festivities and romantic. If these aren't to your liking, they are easily customised.

Changing the background image or video, customising the thumbnail buttons and adding menu background music takes seconds. You can now drag and resize elements in the menu preview and templates customised in this way can be saved and re-applied to subsequent projects with a click.

Prior to burning, a built-in software player fulfils a preview and testing role. As playing motion menus (thumbnail buttons and backgrounds that use video loops) can put a strain on all but the fastest systems, this option can be disabled.

Burning options are more than adequate; you can record straight to disc in standard DVD-video format, Ulead's fast re-editable format, or DVD+VR. Alternatively, you can burn the files to a folder on your hard disk or create a disc image from which multiple copies can be produced. There's also support for dual-layer DVD recording.

At £24.99, DVD Movie Factory 4 is the best value for money DVD authoring application out there. But for existing users it's not a compelling upgrade; many changes are cosmetic and unless your camcorder can shoot 16:9 or you've just invested in a dual-layer burner, you could probably live without the new features.