Product Reviews

Sonic's MyDVD Studio Deluxe is a CD and DVD creation suite similar to Roxio's Creator 7 and Ahead's Nero 6, both of which are also reviewed this month. It consists of five programs: MyDVD 5.2, CinePlayer, Simple Backup, RecordNOW! Deluxe and Express Labeller.

Simple Backup is a handy utility for backing up your data to CD or DVD discs and can back up and restore your entire system or a set of files you select. Annoyingly, though, it doesn't attempt to calculate how many CDs or DVDs you will need before you start backing up.

CinePlayer is an easy-to-use DVD player with an interface that is both friendly and a bit ugly. It played back our test DVDs successfully, but couldn't play our MPEG4 test file. Express Labeller allows you to select quickly from a number of preset layouts and background styles, but it's a shame that most of these result in garish designs.

For most CD- and DVD-burning tasks you'll need to use RecordNOW! Deluxe. Its interface may not be as slick as those of its main rivals Nero and Creator, but

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it does have a task-style launcher that allows you to select what you want to make rather than having to find the functions you need for a job. It can rip audio CDs to MP3 at several quality levels using either a constant or variable bit rate. You can also burn music files to an audio or MP3 CD, copy or create data discs and create and burn disc images in .gi and .iso format.

MyDVD allows you to turn video files or a slideshow of images into DVD Video discs with menus. Several template designs are included, many of which are of particularly high quality and all of which can be customised. Like Roxio's Creator, MyDVD also includes the handy option to burn video directly from a MiniDV camera to DVD.

Unfortunately, most of the other features are disappointing. The options for video editing are rudimentary, the automatic scene detection tends to detect far too many scene breaks and adding chapter points manually is frustratingly fiddly. Although you can easily add a submenu with links to separate chapters in a film clip, this has several drawbacks. For instance, MyDVD insists on adding the word 'chapters' to any title you enter for the menu, which is annoying. Worse still, we found that inserting both a 'play whole film' link and a set of chapter links (as seen in most commercial DVDs) resulted in MyDVD including the video file twice, making the result far too large to burn to a disc.

MyDVD Studio Deluxe is disappointing. RecordNOW! Deluxe handles simple disc burning well, but the other utilities do not justify its price. Roxio Creator is a better suite for beginners, while Nero offers far better value.