DVD authoring and burning software

[John Ball]

Ulead DVD Workshop came with my SE 1.5 package. I have little experience authoring or burning dvds. I have noticed that Ulead does not get many accolades in the forum. Can anyone recommend something easier to use and better.
John Ball

[dweinkauf]

I still use and love working with it for SD work. It's a tragedy that the company never updated it.

[donx]

I find Sony DVD Architect to be fairly good to work with once you watch the tutorials.

[sandman300]

Ulead was purchased be Corel, so if anything could be considered an update to workshop, it would be Movie Factory Pro.

I loved DVD workshop, it could do more than most programs (then) and was a lot less expensive. I took a quick look at the Movie Factory Pro, but by the time it came out I had a much better workflow and I never took the time to see if it measured up to its predecessor. But from what I did see, it didn't.

[dweinkauf]

As I said, I still use DVD Workshop for my SD work and have no desire to switch until I switch over to HD. It certainly was a black day in hell when Corel bought the software.

[John Ball]

Thanks you three for the comments. I will stick with ULead at least for my present project. Learning how to use the software is half my struggle. I find the file pathway not easy with ULead but I will eventually come to grips with it.
John Ball

[xpycm]

I use TMPGEnc Authoring Works 4.0 and I am happy with it. New version 5.0 is available now - you can try it for 14 days (limited functions though...)

Highly recommend!

[John Ball]

Hi xpycm
I have read a few good reviews re TMPGenc Authoring Works.... You say limited functions? I don't need much beyond basic authoring, encoding and good burning quality. Does it do the basics well?

[xpycm]

Hi xpycm
I have read a few good reviews re TMPGenc Authoring Works.... You say limited functions? I don't need much beyond basic authoring, encoding and good burning quality. Does it do the basics well?

I meant, limited functions for the trial version... Sorry for the confusion. It has everything you need and more...

[blueisland]

For what its worth

TMPGenc Authoring Works - in my opinion is dreadful, it is badly designed and not intuitive. Overpriced too.

Ulead dvd workshop - can't do wide screen menus.

Sony Architect is excellent it does everything including bluray.
The only thing is you have to do is to make pre-encoded mpeg2 to get the correct aspect ratio. I use TMPGenc to make these files.

Good luck!

[donx]

I tend to agree on the capacities of Sony Architect. It's a quite flexible and smoothly opperating program. I found it difficult to figure out the logic of where they put, and call, their features, but once I watched the tutorial videos I was able to find what I needed and realize that this program is ready for pro menu building if your imagination takes you there... and it makes it easy to do simple DVD's. It's also very innexpensive to get the stand alone version.

[VisionTecVideo]

I personally use DVDiT Pro from Sonic. I've used it for several years and it is very easy to use for SD and HD. Unfortunately they no longer provide updates/newer versions of the product or sell the older version I already have. I too personally am looking for something similar for the day I will be forced to start using a different DVD author program simply because newer operating systems will stop working with it, since it was developed for XP systems. I'm currently using Windows 7 and it works, but does give me problems once in a while, more than when I was using XP system.