Review by R.Suarez

I ordered this item as I purchased last year a Toshiba Satellite that included a DVD Movie factory by Ulead that works pretty well, very cool templates and other functionalities that have allowed me to create very good-looking DVDs. There were some opportunity areas (for example, if you add a music file to a menu you have no way to edit the audio file or select a portion of it, I have to use Cool Edit to format the audio file to what I need) So I thought the retail version would have more functionalities than the one I already had and decided to get this one.

First of all I had no problems installing it, while I am stuck with the awful Windows Vista, installation ran smoothly and with no incidents. The software comes with a manual that I honestly have not used, the features are very easy to use and so far I have not needed to consult the user guide.

There are three applications and only two of them I have used, the one I haven’t tried I really do not have a use for it which is to extract video files from a camera or similar device. I own a Sony DHC and I use the basic windows functionality to extract the files from it.

The first one I’d like to talk about is the video editing software included. While it may not have as many functionalities as the retail box makes you believe, it has some interesting features. First of all, it allows you to select an intro theme to your video which then you can add music to, same as the DVD factory I previously owned, there is no way to edit the audio you use in here, so say the intro is about 10 seconds and you add an mp3 file of over a minute, the song will play over the menu AND your video. There is a neat feature that allows you to trim your video and select the bits and pieces you want to keep or remove. What I liked the most is that this program offers the possibility of extracting video from a DVD and then edit the video on your own. I tried several of my home made DVDs and some of them worked and some others didn’t, which is a shame but I believe it might be due to the way in which they were recorded, the ones that didn’t work were recorded with a DVD recorder I got to copy my VHS into DVDs. I also tried some music DVD’s I own playing with the idea of creating a music video compilation, well, it worked. What the program does is that it extracts the selected video track from the DVD into an mpeg file, from there you can edit it or keep a backup copy of it if you like.

After you are done editing and preparing your videos you can then create your movie. So far I have only created DVDs and VCDs and it has worked great, there are several templates included, some of them look very professional and some others look like they were made in power point, fortunately, the menus can be personalized and you can add/remove things to your taste. In the case of DVD menus there is a feature that allows you to edit the background music, something I really appreciated as I won’t have to rely on an external program to do so.

Overall, a great product with some neat functionalities, I have lots of videos I have taken with my Sony camera as well as others I have downloaded and I am happy I got this product. The only time it has failed is when I attempted to open a divx formatted file, it crashed. I have not really had the time to investigate if this is normal or if there is some kind of codec I need to download. I will update the review if I find anything on that.