Roxio MyDVD 8 Premier review

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Verdict:

Aimed squarely at the beginner, this film-editing suite is designed to get your movies off your PC and onto DVD. Though not as versatile as other video-editing software it should suit most dabblers.

Review Date: 21 Apr 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Dave Stephenson

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

If a camcorder is at the top of your wish list, you would do well to put video-editing software in the number two spot.

Although many camcorders have rudimentary editing facilities built in, if you want to give your home movies some polish, you'll need dedicated software.

Roxio MyDVD 8 is aimed squarely at the beginner, and at making life as easy as possible. Inevitably, this means sacrificing some power, but it's a fair trade for a piece of software as easy to use as this. Indeed, a lack of flexibility is the most severe criticism we can lay at the feet of Roxio's new software, as it otherwise includes everything you need to go from raw footage to a slick-looking DVD.

Once your footage is on your PC, VideoWave 8 lets you chop it up into scenes, sprinkling fades, transitions, soundtracks and overlays throughout. This is slightly limited - you can have a maximum of three soundtracks: one for music; one for narration and one for sound effects. While this will be plenty for most, it means that if you want to have one music track fading into another, you'll need to create the track yourself using separate software.

Once your footage is finished, MyDVD Express will help you create a DVD menu. Anyone who has used a graphics website design program will be on familiar ground when creating links to other menus from existing images. It's all extremely intuitive, and while creating something that works well and looks good takes a while, it's a worthwhile learning curve.

If what you need is a way to distribute professional-looking DVDs and you aren't too worried about having complete control, MyDVD 8 is an excellent piece of software. It's not very flexible, but with pre-set templates as good as this, it doesn't need to be.

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