Ulead DVD Movie Factory 2

It's still early days for DVD authoring and, to date, few developers have managed to produce an application that makes it as simple as it should be.

DVD Movie Factory 2 goes a long way to improving on ease of use, a downfall of the first edition, and adds some radical effort-saving features like 'Disc-Direct' capture and DVD re-editing.

Capture, editing, authoring and burning are now much more integrated through the redesigned wizard-style interface.

Direct-to-disc capture and burn is the option for the truly lazy; capturing either an entire tape or a predefined section, dropping the clips into a pre-selected menu template and burning, all in one seamless unattended process.

So now you can archive your holiday video to DVD without even having to watch it.

Those who want a more active part in the authoring process won't be disappointed. Movie Factory 2 has a good selection of business and home templates, and the tools with which to mould them to your individual design.

Still image slideshows can now be included. You can rotate portrait stills by 90 degrees, set the duration for each image and add a soundtrack, although that's about all as there are no fancy transition options.

Clips can easily be trimmed, sections of video and audio extracted, chapter points inserted and menu background music added.

You can edit everything from thumbnail images to captions and navigation buttons. Once chapter points are added to clips you have the option of creating sub-menus.

There are lots of small, but thoughtful, features like the option to set the first clip to play on loading (useful for corporate presentations), thumbnail numbers that can be toggled on and off, and the inclusion of project files and personal folders on the DVD.

Movie Factory 2 does an excellent job at a fair price, making it tempting even to those who inherited an authoring application with their DVD burner.

System requirements: 450MHz Pentium III, 64MB of Ram, 150MB of free hard disk space, Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, XP.

Contact: Ulead 01327 844 880
www.ulead.co.uk