Digital Home Thoughts: Ulead's DVD MovieFactory 6 Plus

Figure 4: The Multi-trim screen, featuring the almighty Ad-Zapper.

One feature I’d like to highlight here is the Ad-Zapper, which can be accessed by clicking on the Multi-trim Video button. The Ad-Zapper claims to be able to detect the commercials in a TV recording and allow you to delete them from the video file. I tested this with a 27-minute segment recorded off TV (thanks, Jason!) that contained 2 commercial breaks. The Ad-Zapper module successfully detected and marked both commercial segments and marked the program segments with a ‘P’ and the suspected commercial segments with a ‘C’. After reviewing them to make sure they were right, I simply selected the ‘C’ parts and deleted them. If you do a lot of recording off of TV, this is an invaluable tool.


Figure 5: Choosing a DVD Menu.

The rest of the DVD creation was pretty by-the-book. You can choose any of 44 different menus (some animated), though the box says “Choose from over 100 professionally-designed menu templates”. I’m not sure where those other 50-odd templates were, but they weren’t apparent. Editing the templates was easy, and thankfully they provide a blank template for those of us who don’t like our vacation photos presented by someone else’s vacation photo.


Figure 6: Creating a Slideshow disc.

Creating a Slideshow disc works much the same way as a video disc. Instead of choosing a source video file though, you choose a folder or range of picture files. You can then choose a menu and soundtrack to accompany it.


Audio and data discs proved to be the least self-explanatory parts of the Launcher, as selecting either of these simply launches the Burn.Now program. People who are familiar with disc authoring programs will be able to figure it out, but people who’ve never created a disc before will find themselves reaching for the user manual.


Figure 7: The Burn.Now module for creating an Audio disc.

For example, clicking on Audio Disc in the Launcher gives you five options: MP3 Disc, Audio Disco, DVD Audio, Music DVD Video and CD Extra. The problem is it doesn’t really matter which one you click on because they all simply open Burn.Now with a blank project open. Clicking on CD Extra doesn’t tell you how to add music and data to the same disc, and doesn’t explain why it’s different than a regular Music disc. I have done these sorts of things before, so I was able to muddle through, but a newbie would probably be left scratching his or her head.