Customer Reviews

DVD MovieFactory 3.0 Disc Creator

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This product should have never been released. Clearly Ulead is getting product to market to gain market share when it was obvious the product wasn't ready. The software had too many flaws such as long delays between menu screens and chapter title text input. It was flawed from a usability standpoint, slow menu creation performance, extremely slow DVD compilation but the results were great. It just required alot of patience.

Well it seems Ulead got their act together and that's the reason I'm writing this review. Hopefully everyone can benefit. Ulead has put out a couple of updates to this product that make it a pleasure to use. If you plan on purchasing this (and I recommend you do) you'll have to apply the updates to the product your purchasing. But its well worth it. Trust me. The updates can be found at http://www.ulead.com/tech/dmf/dmf_ftp.htm. First apply Part I then apply Part II.

Here's what has changed with the update. For a multiple menu screen DVD you can apply a common menu title (and font) across all the menu screens (this was manual before and slow). Changing chapter titles, menu titles, or moving between menus is very fast (less than a second as oppose to 20 to 30 seconds and i have a pretty fast machine). The act of moving through a file to set chapter points is faster. DVD compilation has been sped up tremendously to reasonable times (what took hours is now accomplished in under one hour).

This is now a great product that you can quickly produce quality DVD's of home videos. Menu creation is simple (and now fast), and you have the ability to burn directly to disc or output to your hard drive (to burn with your perferred package). I have had absolutely no audio sync issues. The DVD's come out perfect.

I looked at a bunch of packages before I settled on this (even with the initial flaws). The quality was great so I put up with the flaws. But one note on the menu creation. I had to weigh between products that allowed you to have absolute control over designing the menu (Adobe Encore, DVD Lab Pro) and a tool such as this that did not give absolute control but provided a variety of templates (you work within the templates sandbox). I tried both styles and found that for me the manual menu creation of Encore and DVD Lab Pro, while its great, it was more time than I was willing to put into the process. These are home videos not commercial videos for a business. MovieFactory allows you to choose from a variety of templates that define the number of chapters on a single menu screen and the location and size of the chapter windows. The same template has to be applied to all the menu screens in the DVD compilation. It allows you to set your own custom jpg background, motion menus (thats an Adobe Encore add-on product), and menu background music. I refused to consider any product that didn't produce great end results regardless of how great the product usability was. Of these products, the reason I chose MovieFactory was the motion menus (are really nice) and it takes me ten minutes to create a quality menu structure. Thats a trade-off you'll need to decide for yourself and your particular situation.

Highly recommended purchase.

frankly any dvd authoring software under say $200 is not particuarly powerful.

this one is however one of the best. I use several different programs to make my home like videos. I have found not one package in this price range to let me design the 'menu' the way I want.. that is like the ones the commercial movies have.

this one is no exception. But it does have a lot of features for the price. Including one I use every day... namely editing out commercials. it's called multi cut and trim. Of the ones in this price range it is the only one that has it (that seems to actually work).

caution, it is a slow program. slower then some less capeable programs.

you might consider their more costly editing program but you won't get much more flexability.

This product is great! I made a DVD movie in less than an hour (granted I didn't edit the movie). Just straight drag and drop.
I used several packages before, mainly, bundled ones with the recorder and it used to take hours (I'm SERIOUS) just to encode the video. The built-in encoder engine is quick compare to others.

BTW, I'm running the 30 days Trial Version. I'll buy it when it expires.

I recently purchased a DVD burner drive and the burning software bundled with it caused problems with my newly reloaded Win2000 operating system... as it usually does.

I tried downloaded versions of a number of burning software programs, until I tried ULead Moviefactory and it worked very well for me, without taking over my entire computer, so I checked the boxed disk version at Amazon and found it for a very reasonable price. I've purchased it and have been happy with the software, ever since. It's cheaper here in the box, than downloading it from ULead, directly.

I have a few "small button" issues with the frame advance interface of the program, during the editing process, but they are relatively minor. The program is fairly easy to figure out and use without reading the entire manual over and over to make sense of it.

I have tried tons of burning software and still use the free and cheap stuff for CD's because of their simplicity and quality of burn, but ULead DVD Moviefactory Disk Creator 3.0 should be one of the top three DVD/CD burning suites, from my experiences. The only mistakes, I have encountered, have been through user error, and even then, I haven't made a coaster, yet. I've been using it for about four or five months, and it only gets better.

This program does something very few programs on the market do. As a DVD Recorder owner Ulead DVD Movie Factory 2 was one of the few programs that allowed me to take the Sub-Par menu's created on a DVD settop recorder and edit them on a PC making them nicer. DVDMF2 had some drawbacks as you had to have title menus.

Ulead has put out DVDMF3 which has many improved features such as slightly more advanced video editing, and motion menu's. Here is where the major problem begins.

The box for this program *CLEARLY* says that you can edit standalone recorded discs, something I succesfully did with DVDMF2. DVDMF3 though for some reason thinks that my 4.7 gig DVD is 9.4 gigs!!! The only way I was able to burn an edited DVD was by selecting "burn to folder" as "burn to disc" wouldn't allow any burning since the software thinks that your dvd is 9 gigs even though it's only 4 gigs and after it's burned to a folder you can go in and burn it with NERO.

THE PROBLEMS GET WORSE: I called Ulead's customer support and they told me to download the update. I took their advise and I noticed it said one of the things the update does is "Fixes the disc size estimation problems previously seen in trimmed video cases"

I immediately jumped for joy when I downloaded this only to be completely screwed! What this website failed to mention is that the update also adds enhanced copy protection making it impossible to edit DVD's recorded on a standalone recorder.

Discs recorded on a friends Panasonic, and my mom's GoVideo failed miserably as I get the message "the disc is not editable because of copyright protection". Now I can nolonger edit discs with copyright protection through the "edit disc" option.

For some reason these discs are able to be edited through the "Create Video" option when you go to import DVD however after I spent hours fixing the menu, and inserting various chapter points when I go to write disc the software completely crashes during the burning part.

I've tried reinstalling this software many times and uninstalling it. The update is gone but the "disc is not editable because of copyright protection" error message doesn't go away.

I installed this software on my laptop, thankfully I know not to install the update, however it's a total pain because most of the time on my 1 year old Sony laptop my computer completely crashes when I am trying to burn a DVD.

The $80 that I spent on this program got flushed down the toilet and when I called customer support they honestly said to me "I don't know what to tell you" and I've considered going to small claims court to recover my money. The box saying "it will allow you to edit settop recorded dvd's" is an outright lie! They completely screwed me over by not warning me before downloading that patch.

This is the most buggy software I've ever used. Beta programs that I've tested have never had close to the amount of errors, and problems this program has.

I'd recomend staying away from this program!
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Update: I later discovered that it was actually TDK causing the "this disc is not editable problem", it didn't help though, finished DVD's are now *POORLY OUT OF SYNC* I had one DVD so out of sync that it was if I was watching a subtitle film with no subtitles.

The program has plenty of crashes and I would recomend staying away.

If only all software were this way. It's so simple you don't even need to read the instructions. It's very intuitive. And it works. The creative control is not as great as Ulead's DVD Workshop 2, but almost (and much less expensive). Amazon's price is unbeatable. I have not see any DVD authoring software that is is this good and simple to use.

I've been looking for a good home movie transfering software for several months, and after reading many reviews and trying many trials, I can say that this one is best in the under $100 price point! If ONLY they had made it easier to snip little pieces out of the middle of clips instead of having to do splits and markers, it would have been a 5+ instead of a 5-. It also offers options on sound so that you won't have to bother with resetting your set top DVD player. Don't pay attention to the 'pro' reviews at popular PC magazine sites on this product. They are wrong. I highly recommend over anything else out there.

I got the trial for this program, because I tried DVD creator that came with my computer which is a losusy program the image and sound sometimes skipped, when you watched de VCD or the DVD. By the way I couldn't watch my home movies in the living room's DVD. So I tried different DVD editors. I downloaded several tials and the two best were ArcSoft Showbiz 2 and this one, but this one cost me about a third of what the showbiz program costs, so it was a no brainer get this one that also includes disc copier, a fast one by the way, a Photo Slide Show Disc. You can create either DVDS os VCDs, music cds including MP3 CDS OR MP3 DVD's but you can't convert audio files to MP3 the only weakness. You can also create data CD's and also edit previously recorded and not yet closed cds.
It's everypennies worth. Best of all is not as intimidating as Nero 6 or unastable as roxio Easys CD and Dvd creator.
Don't think you can make hollywood kind of DVD's but at least you can impress your family with menus, chapters, this is very important if you are in a hurry and want to watch just a particular scene, so you don't have to fast forward or rewind the disc.
I recommend it and it's mre like 4.5 stars.

I am ecstatic about this product. "DVD MovieFactory 3.0" works so much better than the "Click to DVD 1.3" software that came with my Sony Vaio. The user interface is not quite as intuitive as "Click to DVD", but I have a lot more flexibility to be creative with my menus, background images, and background music.

Most importantly, "DVD MovieFactory" is fast and reliable. "Click to DVD" crashes a lot. I wonder why I didn't buy "DVD MovieFactory" sooner. So, now that I have great DVD authoring software, I spend my time watching my videos instead of frustrating myself with trying to create them. Thanks, Ulead!

I previously gave this product 2 stars because the discs I burned would not play properly.
Tech support directed me to several patches to download and install, and after doing so, I was able to burn discs that actually played.
The software should have some more functionality, which is why I can't give it any more than 3 stars.