Digital Home Thoughts: Ulead's DVD MovieFactory 6 Plus

Figure 2: The Label@Once Module.

The Print Disc Label button opens Ulead’s Label@Once program, which allows you to add images and text to a pre-sized CD Label template and print it. This program is nice to see, but is really not very useful. Most people who still print on labels and stick them to CDs are using specific size sheets with labels at specific points, and while Label@Once does allow you to create a specific template for your labels, it’s not an experience I would recommend. What I would really have liked to see here is support for printers that can print directly on the CD, as well as LightScribe drives. For those of you who don’t have the ability to print or ‘scribe’ directly onto a disc, I recommend a Sharpie.

Let's Burn
For the most part, I found creating discs in DVD MovieFactory to be pretty easy and self-explanatory, requiring very little guesswork on my part. There were, however, a few exceptions where I think someone new to the whole disc authoring arena would be confused. Audio and Data CDs in particular were something I accomplished simply because I had used similar programs in the past and knew what I was doing. I’ll get to that in a second though.


DVD MovieFactory is primarily a program for creating video DVDs and photo slideshows, so it’s no surprise that Video/Slideshow Disc is the first option in the Launcher. As the primary focus of this program, it’s important that this component, at the very least, is easy to use. Thankfully, it was. Both video and slideshow projects are created in the main MovieFactory program, which is basically the same as the DiscRecord program.


Figure 3: The MovieFactory main DVD creation screen.

Creating a video DVD was easy and painless, though a little time-consuming. I tested this program on my P4 3Ghz/1GB RAM machine and it took a bit longer than the runtime of the file itself to render and burn it. Thankfully, if you’re one of the lucky ones to have a dual-core CPU, DMF is written to utilize both cores, which should reduce processing time significantly.

As expected, you can capture video from a camera, use a video on your hard drive, or capture a segment from an unencrypted DVD as your source. Once you select a source (I tested it with a WMV file on my hard drive) you then have the option of editing it. Remember Chris’s VideoStudio 11 review? Just about everything that program allows you to do you can do here.