DVD Moviefactory 2.0

by Ulead

Product Features

• Easily produce professional-style DVDs
• Capture video directly from camcorder to DVD or CD
• Archive and share movies, photos, business presentations, and more
• Edit +RW and -RW DVDs again and again
• Create CD labels and case covers

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00007KDWC
• Item model number: A26-420-111-0A0000
• Date first available at Amazon.com: December 30, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,948 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Ulead DVD MovieFactory is the easiest way to burn home movies onto DVDs or CDs. Now you can produce professional-style DVDs to play on your DVD player!

• Capture video directly from camcorder to DVD or CD saving valuable hard-drive space
• Create professional-looking scene selection menus
• Archive and share movies, photos, business presentations, and your favorite TV shows
• Edit your +RW and -RW DVDs again and again
• Burn your videos onto CDs or DVDs and play on TV or computers
• Create your own CD labels and case covers

Product Description

SINGLE USER

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good author/burning, basic menu/editing, pitiful transcoding, October 20, 2003

By 

keviny01 - See all my reviews

This review is from: DVD Moviefactory 2.0 (CD-ROM)

Ulead's Moviefactory 2.0 (MF2) is among the cheapest DVD authoring tools available. The same price group also includes Cyperlink's PowerProducer and Sonic's MyDVD. But MF2 has the best features and is the most reliable among the three. I've been using it to record TV programs and burn them onto DVDs, and the results looked very close to the original broadcast with no audio sync problems. It has worked perfectly with my DVD rewritable drive (Sony DRU500AX) and has not created a single unreadable disc. I've used several brands of discs: Memorex +R 1x and 4x, -RW 1x, and +RW 2.4x, Verbatim -R 4x, Ritek -R 4x, and also generic brands like Meritline -R 2x, Princo -RW 1x, and Leda -R 4x, and they have all been burned successfully. The readability of the burned discs is also what I would expect. The more compatible -R discs were playable on all my DVD players and drives, while the +R, -RW, and +RW discs were playable on only some of them. (The compatibility of recordable DVDs is a known issue in the industry.)

To use MF2's built-in capture tool, you need a video capture card. (Mine is an ancient Pinnacle Studio PCTV tuner/capture card with BT878 chipset, with generic WDM drivers for Windows ME). MF2 is able to capture MPEG files with DVD-, VCD- or SVCD-compliance. For DVD-compliant MPEG capturing, you can only choose among the preset bitrates: CBR or VBR, 4000, 6000, or 8000 Mbps. You can choose between MPEG Layer II or LPCM audio, but you can't set the audio bitrate. You can choose between interlaced or non-interlaced capturing. Since most TV broadcasts are interlaced, capturing at interlaced mode is preferred; but be sure to choose the correct field order, or jerky motion will result. You cannot adjust advanced settings such as GOP count, number of I-Frames and P-frames, etc. to improve your capture. There is, however, a "quality" setting to improve picture quality. Set it as high as you can, but without burdening the CPU so much that it would cause dropped frames. On my Intel P4 2.4MHz, while capturing at VBR 8000 Mbps with MPEG Layer II audio 384 Kbs (my preferred settings for high-quality captures), I could set quality up to 12 (max is 15) without dropping frames, with CPU utilization at about 85% during capture. It is a good idea to monitor CPU utilization (with a tool such as CPUIdle) during capture. If it is near or at 100%, dropped frames would be very likely. Also, any activity that would increase CPU utilization, even as minor as moving your mouse, should be avoided in order to achieve no dropped frames. Video capturing is the first and most important step in DVD creation. Without a video source with good quality and DVD compliance, it would be necessary to re-encode, or transcode, the MPEG source, which is a laborious and time-consuming process.

MF2's own transcoding ability, however, is horrendous (and PowerProducer and MyDVD are even worse). Transcoding is done automatically whenever a non-compliant source is detected, or you can force MF2 to transcode. The resulted video is often filled with skipped frames and audio sync problems, indicating MF2's inability to alter video resolution and resample audio bitrate reliably. When I need to transcode, I use an external tool like TMPGEnc, and pass the resulted MPEG file back to MF2 before authoring the DVD. The best way is, of course, to avoid having to transcode altogether by obtaining a high-quality, compliant source material.

Thankfully, MF2 can author and burn DVDs reliably. You can author and burn to disc directly, or you can author to hard disk first and burn it to disc later. You can also create an ISO image of the authored files, and later burn the DVD from the image file. MF2 can also reliably detect the burning speed of a disc.

MF2 lets you add chapter stops and design menus for your DVD, but they are for the most basic purposes only. Menu design is template-based, and there is no "free-form" design. Chapter stops are added after video capture, either manually or automatically at an adjustable time interval (some software can create chapter stops during capture, but not MF2). You are only limited to adding a main menu and a chapter menu on your DVD. You cannot create additional screens for your own special purposes. You can, however, create "slide shows" -- a series of static images. There are a lot of menu templates to choose from, with a variety of background graphics and button placements. You can also import your own background graphics and add background music for your menu screen. You can also omit the menus altogether (which I often do, because the menus created with MF2 surely aren't going to impress anybody).

There are certain advanced functions that MF2 and other products in its price range cannot do, such as adding multiple audio tracks, subtitle tracks, multi-angles, 5.1 audio tracks, AC-3 audio processing, and more sophisticated menu designs. Software with these features usually cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Software with advanced video editing tools cost even more.

And MF2 is also very basic in video editing. It doesn't let you combine two video clips into one, insert transition effects, nor manipulate the audio. About the only useful thing it lets you do is extract portions of a clip.

A trial version of MF2 is available at Ulead's web site. It is fully functional for 30 days, with a limit of 20 pictures per slide show. The full version has no such limit.

Ulead also released a patch for MF2 on 8/22/03, notably adding PAL capture ability and fixing a few bugs.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Buyer Beware! Bugs described here., April 7, 2003

By 

Old Man Grumpus (Federal Way, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: DVD Moviefactory 2.0 (CD-ROM)

After researching many different DVD authoring products on the market, I selected DVD Moviefactory 2.0 for its reputation as an easy program to learn. I have used it extensively for two months and would like to cover what I think are some important points for prospective buyers.

1. The user interface was very simple for me to learn. I was up and running in a day. It allows basic editing, chapters, menus, background pictures and music, etc.

2. However: DVD Moviefactory contains confirmed BUGS that have not been patched as of this writing. They are discussed in much detail in the user forums on Ulead's website. The most glaring flaws that I encountered were:

-2A. The menu font colors can change to black during the DVD burning process for no reason. If your menu has a dark background, this means your chapter titles will essentially disappear.

-2B. The calculation of file sizes and movie lengths are WRONG. Let's say you capture a two-hour TV movie and trim the commercials using the Extract Video function. The window will show you have 90 minutes of footage remaining. However, when you return to the main screen and prepare to burn your disc, the program will still show two hours total; and depending on the capture settings for the footage, it will appear that your file is too large for a DVD when that isn't the case. You are left with having to do the math yourself to estimate the file size of your movie. To avoid burning a coaster, you can burn an image of the DVD to your hard drive PRIOR to burning it on disc, which also reveals the next problem...

-2C. The program by default re-configures both the audio and video settings of your footage during the creation process. The result is that you can have a movie that is shown to take 4.4G of space (enough to fit on one DVD) that mysteriously increases to 5.6G (too big for one DVD) when you burn the DVD image to your hard drive.

Ulead's support technician Gerard acknowledged each of these issues as bugs. Other users have reported problems with synchronization between video and audio but so far I have not experienced this.

3. Don't plan on receiving ANY help from the manufacturer. My emails went unanswered. And in one case, I waited on hold LONG DISTANCE for 30 minutes, only to be switched over to a voicemail recording. The user forums on Ulead's website echo this sentiment in posting after posting.

I wasted [some money] in DVD+Rs in discovering the little surprises described above. However, the impression I get from reading reviews of other similar products is that NOBODY has the corner on a reliable DVD authoring package; not Pinnacle, nor Dazzle, nor Roxio, nor Ulead. So while I would probably not change my purchase in hindsight, I do recommend researching as thoroughly as possible before you buy and be prepared for bugs whatever you choose.

My machine: 2.0Ghz AMD, ATI Radeon AIW 9800, 1 gig RAM, 100 gig HD.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Works ok for me, September 11, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: DVD Moviefactory 2.0 (CD-ROM)

I have tried various products to simply convert my home videos to DVDs. I have tried Dazzle, Pinnacle, MGI Videowave, Sonic MyDVD and few others, and wasted hundreds of dollars in process.

MovieFactory 2 is great for beginners, it offers no video editing, but does a great job otherwise. Burning DVDs with my Dell (NEC DVD+RW) is a snap. Adding chapters, title music, picture slideshows is very easy. It also comes with various easy to use templates/samples.

One nasty limitation: Each picture slideshow can have only upto 20 pictures. It should have been at least 50.

Another gripe, it does not capture video from my Firewire card, I must use Sonic to do it.

I urge every potential buyer to download the trial copy first from ULead. No DVD rendering software is yet mature enough to fit everyone's needs.