Product Reviews

Studio Deluxe consist of five programs. MyDVD is for editing video and creating DVDs and VCDs. CinePlayer is a software DVD player, for watching movies on your PC. RecordNow contains all the CD burning and reading functions. Simple Backup helps you back up vital files to CD or DVD and Express Labeller creates flashy labels for your discs.

The video editing and DVD creating functions of MyDVD are basic, but fun. There's one simple production line, to which you can add video, clips, stills and a choice of preset transitions and filters. You can give your movie a music soundtrack and then balance the volume of your new music track and the original audio. MyDVD also lets you add titles to your movie using various fonts, point sizes and any colour you choose. What MyDVD lacked, however, that Roxio Creator 7, our current Top 50 in this category has, is precision coupled with sophistication. Roxio's program gives you far greater control over exactly how your final movies will appear. For instance, it allows you to vary the relative volume of one or more soundtracks at different points in your film. MyDVD only allows you to set relative volume for the whole of a single piece of video. Similarly, Roxio lets you specify exactly how long you want a text overlay to remain onscreen. MyDVD keeps it onscreen for a whole scene, often leading to an incongruous juxtaposition of text and unrelated footage. MyDVD is a CD and DVD creation package that happens to offer some rather fun video functions, so we didn't hold its deficiencies in this area against it

ADVERTISEMENT

too badly. On the other hand, Creator 7 just offers so much more, so why not take it?

If you want to make copies of CD tracks to your computer's hard drive, MyDVD offers you three music

file formats to choose from: MPR, MP3-VBR, and simple WAV files. Creator offers you five formats to choose from, including Microsoft's WMA and the free-to-use Ogg Vorbis, which creates smaller, better-sounding files than MP3.

Simple CD burning functions worked fine. We copied a CD, copied an image of a CD on to our hard drive, made an audio CD from MP3 files, and created a data disc. We had no problems with any of these options. They worked fine, and the simple, straightforward controls guided us through them without undue complication.

CinePlayer is a decent software DVD player. It has all the normal options for resizing the video window, right up to full screen. It supports both stereo and Dolby surround sound, and it has some useful parental control functions that let you stop your kids watching certain types of movies. We particularly liked the screen capture function that allows you to choose exactly where you want to save the captured images. Simple backup allows you to either do a full system backup, or to choose which files you wish to archive. It's straightforward and simple to use. Express Labeller was a bit of disappointment. You can't import your own images, so you have to use a number of rather cheesy pre-supplied backgrounds. If do want a little more creative control, you'll have to take the software up on its invitation to pay for an upgrade.

Sonic MYDVD isn't a bad program. It has lots of useful functions, and it's easy to use, even for a complete novice. Compared, however, to our current top 50 Best buy, Roxio Creator 7, it offers few functions and less precise control over what you're doing. For ten pounds more, Creator also gives you all the functions of Roxio's excellent VideoWave video-editing program, which would cost you 70 quid by itself. If MyDVD were 25 pounds rather than 60, it would be a nice budget alternative to Creator 7. At almost the same price, however, it just can't compete.