Thursday, June 30, 2005
Roxio Easy Media Creator 7.5 - One Rockin' Media App!
Posted by Zack Mahdavi in "SOFTWARE" @ 07:45 AM
DVD Builder & VideoWave - Create Video CDs/DVDs
Figure 4: DVD Builder is easy to use, and the menus are decent.
DVD Builder was easy to use. The basic interface allows you to easily create dvd menus and select chapter breakpoints. The default menu that is shown is kind of boring, but there are many other menus to choose from. One of my favorites is the "Feature Presentation," which has a moving video reel in the background. There were only a few dvd menus available in my review copy, but several more should be available in the real product. I burned a couple TV shows with no problem.
Figure 5: The built-in media selector is convenient, but it was very slow on my machine.
One adds media to the DVD using the "Media selector", which is a dialog box that previews your images and videos. You then select your media and drag it onto the menu. However, the media selector is very slow when loading a folder with a lot of videos. It takes quite a while for the thumbnails to generate.
A feature that caught my eye was Plug & Burn. It allows you to hook up your camcorder and burn straight to DVD. This feature sounds very useful, especially if you quickly want to free up a tape to record some more footage. However, I don't own a DV camera, so I was not able to test it.
DVD Builder was a pleasure to use. This will be one program that I will use a lot, especially for archiving TV shows to DVD.
But how do you edit your videos before burning them to DVD? That's where VideoWave comes in. Think of it as the iMovie of the Roxio suite. Having used Apple's iMovie in the past, I was not fond of VideoWave. To do each and every thing, a separate dialog box is required. For example, to add text, you have to click on the clip you want to add text to, then click the "Text" button. Next, a dialog box pops up where you type the text required. Why can't you write your text on the main window?
Figure 6: VideoWave is decent, but it is definitely not my favorite video editing program.
If you're doing a lot of video editing, pick a different program other than VideoWave. Otherwise, you should be fine using VideoWave for small projects.
