Home > Consumer Reviews > DVD Moviefactory 2.0

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.

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.

Does many things that should have been included in original version, and if I still used that I would be upset about being charged for what should be a free product update. Still lacks behind competitors for menu design, titles, overlays, secondary audio. 2.0 seems to be designed towards splicing pre-existing or freshly captured video, making a basic, static (no moving backgrounds or video chapter previews) menu and having some music play in the background. Good enough for archiving old movies or your favorite tv shows, or for ripping dvds, which must be its other primary function if it can import from VOB files. Otherwise, creativity is stifled once again.

Summary: The people who burn dvds are rapidly increasing in number and in skill. Movie Factory (1.0 or 2.0) is too dumbed-down of a product to be of use.

I bought the program to edit DVDs made by a Philips DVDR recorder. Since it is digital recorder it naturally uses Dolby Digital AC-3 Stereo Audio (duh). Unfortunately, I did not carefully peruse the Ulead site where it clearly states that MovieFactory does not import AC-3 audio. ...

First of all, this program is worth its price. It's straightforward, stable, and creates very nice DVDs -- once you get used to it.

Major gripe: It cannot accurately calculate file sizes. It may show that a certain DVD program will fit on a DVD after file conversion when it actually won't: it ends up creating files which are too big, ultimately giving you a notice saying "will not fit onto disk" after hours of transcoding.

Minor gripe: It will not let you set the default font type, size, and color for project menus, meaning that if you have 6 clips (titles) with 6 chapters each, you have to manually set the font and its properties individually 36 times, not including the top menu.

Don't let Movie Factory do your video encoding. What I do, and recommend, is using another program to edit and prepare each clip, including the encoding to DVD-ready MPEG. (I use Ulead Video Studio 7, and it does a great job.) Then import the MPEG files into Movie Factory and have it make the DVD. That's what works great for me.

It's a combination that's inexpensive and gives impressive results.