Movie Factory is an excellent product for novice DVD creators, or anyone needing a quick and simple DVD authoring application. Read our Australian review. It's certainly no secret that DVD burners are a very hot commodity in the IT space at the moment; virtually every type of user can see a use for 4.7GB of storage space, especially for multimedia content. The market for drives has improved a great deal in a very short space of time, but the same can't be said for the software to back it up, leaving many users with great drives that they're unable to take full advantage of. This is especially true at the consumer and novice end of the spectrum, and it's this market that Ulead's DVD Movie Factory 3 Disc Creator is aimed at.
DVD Movie Factory is an all-in DVD Menu Authoring and burning solution with an emphasis on wizard-based ease of use. Following installation, you're met with eight options covering the most common DVD burning tasks -- DVD movie creation being foremost, although you can also use the package for burning audio and data discs. Somehow, we can't see too many users picking up the package for this particular use. If you've used previous versions of the package, the most significant improvements are the ability to create motion menus, use Dolby AC-3 encoding for your audio, and record directly from compatible cameras without an intermediate hard drive step.
The first step to creating a movie DVD is adding in video clips; Movie factory can accept any files you've already got on your PC, as well as via firewire from any compatible video camera.
Movie Factory 3 Disc Creator gives the user a limited editing suite for video clips. From a power user's perspective, it isn't up to much, but that's not the target market for this particular product. If all you need to do is cut out certain sections of a file, or join it up, it's easy enough to do so. It's also possible to add transitions and text to video clips, which is simple enough to do, although we can see the ability to automatically add random transitions in for each scene change being mercilessly abused and used to create some really awful looking home movies. Taste, as always, remains subjective. The other real use for Movie Factory's editing suite is to set up short introductory clips for when a DVD is first launched, as it's quite painless to cut video down.
Once you've selected and/or imported your chosen files, you can then choose from a variety of menu layout templates grouped under common themes -- corporate, festivities, romantic and so on. Each of these templates can be modified with whatever background image or musical theme you want to apply to your DVD, as well as the option to create motion-based menu selection.
At the simplest level, Movie Factory will grab a still image of the first second of each segment as an iconic representation of each clip, but you can opt for it to instead render the clip in miniature form -- the default length is twenty seconds, which should give your prospective viewer plenty of time to discern what's in the clip. It's a great touch for those wanting to impress with a snappy layout, and if you're exceptionally keen, you can even have a motion background. In almost every test case we laid out, however, the combination of a motion menu and motion background was extremely distracting, but again, tastes vary.
Once you're happy with the layout of your DVD, it's onto the final processing and burning stage. While layout can be done simply and quickly, there's no getting around the amount of time it'll take to then post-process and burn your created disc. On our test machine burning at 2.4x to a DVD+RW disc, it took a little over 3.5 hours to create and burn a three page DVD menu with animated icons. As such, it's really a task best suited for when you can afford to walk away from your PC for a while -- or at the very least have a very large cup of coffee at the ready.
Ulead also bundles in a rudimentary label creator and DVD playback software application with the package, although rather annoyingly the label creator won't run on a system that doesn't have a printer installed, meaning you can't remotely create labels for later printing. The DVD player is workable enough for a PC-based DVD application, and certainly useful for testing your final product out.
Ulead DVD Movie Factory 3 Disc Creator
Company: Ulead
Price: US$99.95, US$69.95 upgrade
Distributor: Selected resellers or via download
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I am sorry, but having used Movie Factory 2 for over a year, paying for the upgrade is just about the biggest waste of money I can recall for software (ah, maybe Cleaner 5 and 6 take the accolade for most useless software).
MF3 is buggy. It crashes and freezes and most stupid of all, if I set up mpeg compliant files that just need authoring into a disk, this frigging software insists on re-rendering and takes all day to do it -- or decides itself it wont do it and quits!! What a huge backward step. DO NOT BUY THIS. I am a customer of Ulead and I know. MF2 is OK for amateurs. MF3 is not good enough even for amateurs