Digital Home Thoughts: Ulead's DVD MovieFactory 6 Plus

Figure 8: Burn.Now for Data disc creation. Note the similarities to the Audio creation screen.

Authoring a Data disc is only intuitive because the Burn.Now interface resembles Windows Explorer. It’s safe to say anyone familiar with Windows Explorer should be just fine creating a data disc in MovieFactory 6. I think it should be noted here that the box implies that there are backup tools included in the package, allowing you to easily back your data up onto a disc. While data backup is certainly possible, it’s only possible by doing so manually in Burn.Now. It would have been nice to see a simple automated backup program included, which would have rounded out the data disc offerings nicely.


The Import/Capture function is available from the main Launcher menu, and while I didn’t have a camera to test it with, I’m sure they work as expected. I would, however, like to point out that most cameras come with capture programs of their own and I would speculate that most people who capture video directly from their cameras would be most comfortable in those programs. I can see how having it all in one place would be beneficial though.


The Edit/Append Disc feature is next in the Launcher, and it does pretty much what it says it does: allows you to edit or append to the contents on a pre-burned disc. While I’m sure this would be useful to some people, I usually recommend that people close their disc sessions (preventing further writing to the disc) and avoid rewritable DVDs. You might be different though, and thankfully Ulead’s thought of you.




Figure 9: Coppying unencrypted DVDs is as easy as it gets.

Using the Copy Disc tool in the Launcher, you can copy or rip an un-encrypted DVD to your hard drive. Also featured here is the ‘Burn from Disc Image’ function. The Copy Disc tool is pretty straightforward. You tell it which disc drive is the ‘source’ and which is the ‘destination’, both the same drive in my case. The DVD rip feature (‘Burn DVD Folders to Disc’) is nothing to write home about. You can save the DVD as either an .ISO file or Ulead’s proprietary .IXB disc image file. It would be nice to see some .AVI file support here.


Lastly, the Disc Tools feature allows you to Format, Erase or Close a disc. I’m not sure when I’d ever format or erase a CD or DVD, but I’ve often wished for the easy ability to close a disc I accidentally left open.