Product Reviews

DVD Suite 6 is a suite of tools designed to help you get the most from your PC's DVD drive. This latest version even includes support for writing to Blu-ray and HD DVD discs if you have hardware that supports one of these formats. Rather than use two separate applications for watching and creating DVDs, you can do both in one package.

Not only does DVD Suite provide useful tools for editing video directly from your digital video camera, it includes a plethora of other utilities. Along with the usual slideshow and MP3/WMA audio disc creation tools, there's an auto backup utility that you can use to schedule incremental backups to a writeable disc or hard drive partition. This is just as easy to use

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and effective as some of the best dedicated auto backup utilities we've seen. Every utility is accessible from a clear main console, and each one is explained as you roll your mouse over it. Your most frequently used modules can be added to a Favourites tab for quick access.

PowerDirector, the video editing tool, doesn't devour system resources and was perfectly usable on a modest laptop with 1GB RAM. We found it simple to create reasonably polished footage from our home videos. The program is logically organised into four main steps: Capture, Edit, Produce and Create. During the Edit stage, you can browse through galleries or 'rooms' of effects, titles, transitions and music to drag and drop onto your video storyboard. The Magic Movie Wizard automatically gives it a cheesy ready-made intro screen based on themes like Holiday and Christmas. You can output your finished movie straight to disc, save it as a web-optimised file, write it back to your camera's tape or even upload it direct to YouTube.

We would have liked to see an easier way to switch between the individual utilities, as this was unclear in some cases. Overall, though, this is a handy suite that won't replace serious video editing or DVD authoring software but provides a full set of everyday DVD tools in one box.