Makin' DVDs: Slide Shows from Ulead, Home Videos from Ravisent Two Software Solutions Work With Recordable CD or DVD Drives Eric Grevstad
Fri 11/9/01 -- Got a CD or DVD burner? Got the creative urge? Whether you're into still-image slide shows or capturing and editing home videos, two software vendors are ready to help you express yourself.
Ulead Systems Inc.'s slide-show generator, Ulead DVD PictureShow, makes it simple to drag and drop images into presentation projects, customizing photo order and rotating pictures, then specifying the duration between photos and using an MP3 or WAV file to add background music.
The program outputs finished slideshows to DVD or VCD (video format on standard CD media), recording up to 99 shows with 99 images per show on a single disc. A wide range of customizable menu and title templates is available, as is DVD emulation to preview a project. Ulead DVD PictureShow costs $35 boxed or $30 as a download.
If you're more ambitious, Ravisent Technologies Inc. is ready to put you in the director's chair with iDVD, a software suite that combines the company's CinePlayer DVD 4.0 playback (DVD and MPEG-2 decoding) solution with MedioStream's neoDVDstandard 2.0. The iDVD bundle costs $130.
The MedioStream software offers a real-time, end-to-end package for camcorder users to capture, edit, compress, author, and burn DVD or VCD movies onto recordable drives. It requires a FireWire connector and an AGP graphics card with at least 8MB of memory.