Corel Ulead Movie Factory 6 Review

By Richard Marx

 Movie Factory 6 is an affordable and simple to use program that enables you to easily capture and edit your videos and then create and burn DVDs 

If you are looking for a simple to use program that enables you to easily capture and edit your videos, and then create and burn DVDs featuring your home movies and family adventures, then the new MovieFactory 6 from Corel could be the product for you. With a list price of just $49.99, this latest version of Movie Factory adds several important and powerful new capabilities to an already impressive piece of consumer video editing software.

This is not a professional or prosumer product. It is targeted for those who need an easy and fast way to create home movies and DVDs with their camcorder.

When you first launch MovieFactory, it starts with a Launcher Screen that provides one click access to most of the programs features. The first step, then, is to figure out what you want to do.

You can create a video or slide show DVD or CD, an audio disc or even a data disc. You can import video from a digital file on your hard drive or USB camcorder, or you can capture video from a DVD or webcam.

It works with standard DV camcorders as well as HD and HDAVC camcorders. You can also import and edited captured TV broadcasts.  Other options include editing discs you have already created or copying a disc. As you can see, in many ways, this program is architected as a disc management tool with the video capture and editing thrown in on top.

Most of us will want to create a video or slide show disc. Starting with the launcher, you have a few choices. You can create a new video project, burn video from a camcorder directly to a disk, create a slideshow, or work on an existing DVD project.

It offers two video editing modes. The storyboard mode is excellent for constructing your project and creating a basic overview of the order of your scenes. You also can use the Timeline mode to fine-tune your project and add special effects, titles, transitions, background music, overlays, etc.  You can even record and add voice over narration. This is great for family event videos as well as travelogues. You can blend and intermix videos with graphics and still images.

Other cool features include the ability to easily trim your videos and re-arrange them on the timeline and storyboard. The auto-enhance feature makes it possible to easily correct most common brightness and contrast issues.  When creating a slideshow form digital stills, the program includes the ability to precisely control the path and zoom ratios for pan and scan effects. This is how you can bring your digital still images to life.

When creating DVDs, in addition to a nice choice of pre-made menus and titles, and the ability to burn directly from your camcorder to DVD, you can add DVD chapter positions directly to your video while editing.

 Making a DVD Movie with Corel Movie Factory 6

Lets create a new project and then burn it to a DVD. The first step is relatively easy – you find your videos and then bring them into the Select Source & Import Screen screen. You can capture video from a DV camcorder or import video files from a hard drive, USB, flash camcorder or other kind of camcorder that captures video and saves it as a digital file instead of streaming digital video. You can also import pre-existing video files as well as video files from a DVD.

One you have your video captured, you need to trim away the bad stuff and then link the files together prior to applying effects, transitions, music and titles.

You can trim individual clips from the import window or you can go to the edit room and then activate the Set Mark In – Mark Out window which provides much more precise control of your in and out points for each edit. The Mark In – Mark Out Window also provides easy ways to navigate your clip. This is especially important when editing very long clips.

Once you have clips trimmed, you then use the Join Videos command to link them together and proceed to the Edit Room to do the next steps such as selecting a pre-made theme for your DVD, adding music, voice-over, titles, etc.   The pre-made themes allow you to easily and quickly convert your basic edited video into a very slick and professional looking piece, complete with graphics, music and raw titles.

If you prefer, you can create all of this manually.  By selecting the Video Track tab in the Edit Room, you can do some additional editing such as changing the clip direction, setting the audio volume of the clip, slipping the clip and even fixing the brightness of a clip. You can also do multi-trim, which enables you to select the best parts of a long clip and then extract them.

By clicking on the effects tab, you can select the appropriate transitions and drop them onto the storyboard between the trimmed scenes. You can also adjust the length of the transition. As you would expect, the text tab allows you to add titles – of various fonts, and colors and even drop shadows. You can change the orientation of the text and even how long it shows up on the screen. Pretty cool.

By using the music tab, you can add music and control its various properties such as length, volume and fade in/fade out. The Voice tab allows you to record your own voice-over as well as controlling its volume and fade in/fade out.

One very cool feature is the ability to add subtitles to your productions. You can import .srt subtitle files and them control the subtitle positions, colors and fonts.

Once you got your movie looking and sounding the way you want it, you save it and then click on the next button on the bottom right of the screen. That takes you to the DVD menu section where you get to design and create your DVD opening screen and menu items. It includes over 100 pre-designed DVD templates that you can customize.  You can add and change the chapters and titles and fine-tune it until you get it right. You can create 4x3 and wide screen 16x9 menus, complete with animated titles, navigation buttons and decorate objects. You can pan and scan images used for menus as well as stretch and bend them.

For audio, you can convert standard two channel stereo sound into 5.1 surround sound to create a very cool home theatre experience.

The MoveFactory program includes a very nice preview feature so you can take your DVD out for a test run before you actually burn it to a DVD disk. Depending on your hardware and DVD player setup, you can also burn Blu Ray and HD DVD disks as well.

Depending on the speed of your computer, the amount of video and audio you are including, as well as the type of menus, and effects, it can take a while for MovieFactory to assemble, render and burn your finished DVD. On my 3.4 GHz Pentium with a gig of RAM, it took about 20 minutes to create a very simple 3-minute DVD.

I found that the program was quite sluggish on a variety of other functions including capturing video from my DV camcorder and activating its various windows and options.

In addition, I did not find the product easy to figure out. I had to go back and forth between the program and the PDF manual in order to do basic editing and DVD creation tasks. It wasn’t quite as intuitive as other Ulead products.

That being said, for a mere 50 dollars or less for the standard version of MoveFactory 6, you do get a very powerful DVD creation program that also does basic video editing and sophisticated disk management functions.