Home movies used to be clunky and embarrassing affairs, but with the technology now available, you should be able to create Jurassic Park within an afternoon or so.

Home movies have come a long way. Your parents had to feed film into a projector to share your family's holiday bloopers. Today, you can edit your digital footage on a PC and save it on DVDs. Ulead's DVD MovieFactory helps you create flashy, polished DVDs.

We love MovieFactory's ability to create professional-looking menus, but be prepared to peruse the manual -- this tool isn't that easy to use. For simple DVD authoring (importing, converting and burning video), MovieFactory gets the nod. But for flashier results, you'll need a full-fledged video-editing package such as MGI's VideoWave 5.0.

Along with the core software, MovieFactory comes with a variety of useful extras, including the handy CD Label Maker, which lets you create labels for your discs.

MovieFactory's opening screen offers four main choices: capture video, author menus, burn disc images and make CD labels and covers. Capturing video is a three-step process that helps you transfer video from your digital video camera and export it for DVD creation. After you get the video on the PC, MovieFactory holds your hand all the way. The Capture screen, like most of MovieFactory's screens, organises your editing and formatting controls in the top left corner, displays preview images on the top right and arranges video clips along the bottom.

If you specifically need powerful editing tools, don't look to MovieFactory. From the Capture screen, you can make some simple cuts to your movie, but that's about it. You can use timeline controls located under the video to isolate sections of a clip, but the controls are confusing and the manual doesn't help explain them. Once you have selected all your clips, selecting Batch Convert will quickly convert them to another video format. Or select Make A Movie to string clips into one longer video file. MovieFactory's interface is unfortunately neither elegant nor easy to use.

Using MovieFactory, you can export videos to a variety of formats -- more than any other software does -- including DVD, VCD, SVCD, or DV for export back onto your video camera. MovieFactory throws in a few other interesting export options. Files can be exported to email or make a greeting card. When using MovieFactory to send email, however, a niggling problem crops up. MovieFactory will attempt to send the file itself, rather than via whatever email application you use, so it's necessary to have your mail server settings to hand if using this function.

Once you've trimmed your footage and got it in the appropriate format, you're ready to create custom DVD menus that let you jump to either the entire movie or to specific scenes. MovieFactory walks you through the process of starting a new project, creating an on-screen menu of clips and making submenus for each clip so that viewers can quickly jump to different scenes. These menus work only if you're using DVD or SVCD formats, but that's a limitation of the formats, not the software. Thirty-eight templates in five categories (Business, Classic, Cool, Cute, and Romantic) give the on-screen menus a professional touch, although a little more variety in the categories couldn't possibly hurt. When you're done, you can preview the finished product before you burn a disc. Unlike the editing tools, the menu features here are well conceived and easy to follow.

At that point, MovieFactory's Burn screen lets you create a disc image so that you can easily create new DVDs from the same material in the future. You can also output your creation as a VCD or SVCD and burn it onto a standard CD-R/RW if you don't have a DVD burner. In our tests, burning and compression were quick and painless.

We like MovieFactory's CD Label Maker, which lets you create professional-looking CD booklets or round CD labels. Unfortunately, the program's controls are a bit confusing, and the program comes with only four templates to work from: two for booklets and two for labels.

If you have some digital-editing experience and are looking for low-level tools, Ulead's DVD MovieFactory is worthwhile and powerful. However, for beginners it's probably too complicated. The controls on the editing screen can be hard to understand, and the brief manual doesn't provide enough help. At AU$135, MovieFactory should be your choice if you're not picky about editing and are on a budget.

Product Title
Company: Ulead
Price: AU$135
Distributor:  Pineapplehead
Phone:  1800 657 601

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