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Produce Movie Disc: Part 1 - General and adding files

The first program section we look at is the Produce Movie disc section, which allows you to create movies from your digital camcorder recorded home videos, with a VCR recorded TV movies or content from unprotected DVDs. 

Format and capacity selection

This first screen shows us a wizard where we can select the general layout of our movie disc.

This first general screen is split into three different sections. Section 1: Select disc format DVD, VCD, SVCD, Editable DVD and DivX, with short explanations for each of the formats.

In section two, we must select the disk capacity and part three, the select video recording format section is only important if you like to create an editable DVD.

Since we want to create a DVD-movie disc we choose here DVD with a disc capacity of 4.7GB and just jump to next screen.

Content (DVD) overview:

We see again a clear and easy to understand, self-explanatory  screen which shows us the next steps to take to reach our aim to create a movie-DVD.

This wizard is subdivided into five single, well-organised sections; the toolbar on the top consists of six, more or less important buttons, five self-explaining and the preferences button.

On the left we have the boxes for the import and editing of our files. The authoring and preview section on the right is not too small and gives us a good picture of how our final project will look like, further enables the authoring tab and easy way to edit the titles of our clips.

Setting up the preferences:

On the first tab of the preferences we can set the general settings of our project. CyberLink discerns between general settings like working directory, temporary directory and settings for capturing and menus.

The Audio/Video tab accommodates the settings for video and audio quality, Video resolution and location, for the region settings.

But now, let us continue with the creation of our movie and let us look how we can add our video files and photos.

Adding Video files and photos:

Adding the video files to the project isn't a big thing. Besides various file types we can also add our projects, which we have edited with CyberLink's PowerDirector before.

Of course, adding your pictures for the slide show isn't a big thing either and we can also choose between several options for playing back the content. Add background music with fade in, fade out and auto reply options as well as a lots of transition effects. You can choose between three different kinds of duration and also enable a checkbox to backup the pictures in original size on your DVD.

In contrast to adding the video files, you can edit the slideshow immediately after adding the files. Anyway, we will look a bit closer into it a bit later in this review. Let us now add scenes from a DVD to our project.

Scene on DVD:

As you can see in the following screen, is there not much to do to add a selected scene from a DVD to the current project. We have just to select the source drive, a playlist if available and or selecting the chapters you want to add. Then just click the add button and it's done.

The only thing we missed here is an option to select a scene from a DVD which is already saved on the hard disc of the PC.

Capture Disc:

Capture disc is the next available way to add our video clips to our project. The software offers four possible sources for us to add clips to our project. We can add content from a DV-Camcorder, which is our choice, from a TV, a VCR or from a PC camera.

We can see the buttons for the connected and compatible devices near the top on the left. In our example we only see the button for the digital camcorder.

Clicking on it detects the actual given time code from the camcorder as well as other information, such as format and the available space on our hard disc.

After searching our starting position on the DV-tape via the camcorder controls which we can find under the preview screen, we can easily start the capturing process by clicking on the record button and in case we want to go away while capturing, we also can set an automatic recording duration. The capturing itself works well and without any problems.

The first part is now done. We have added our video files and albums without any problems and can now start to edit the content with PowerProducer and its associated software.