Put It On DVD

Your long-winded CEO insisted on introducing your company's newest product. Trouble is, he rambled for a good long hour, and now he wants his breathtaking speech to be seen and heard by all your customers. Luckily, falling rewritable DVD drive prices and sophisticated software can make immortalizing your company's talking head on DVD--in a tactfully edited director's cut--as easy as pressing play.

Well, it might not be quite that easy, but at least it's increasingly affordable: Rewritable DVD drive prices have dipped below $300, on average. That was the price level that allowed CD burners to start setting the world on fire, and we expect the same to happen with DVD burners. On the creative side, DVD authoring software has become more affordable, too--several packages cost as little as $50. And you can get a pretty good set-top DVD player for less than $100 these days, making it easy to view your video discs on your television.

In this article, we've trained most of our attention on video editing and DVD authoring. But turning your PC into a DVD production studio requires several other components, so we have included advice on selecting the best of those as well. For suggestions on shopping for the right DV camcorder, see "How to Choose a Digital Camcorder." For the best rewritable DVD drives, see our Top 10 DVD Drives chart. In addition, we've also outlined some PC configurations that will optimize the video editing process (see "How Much PC Do You Need?").

Everybody Wants to Be in the Movies

Thanks to DVD's popularity, you have a crowded field of video editing and DVD authoring software to pick from. Figuring out which product does what--and what each does well--can be difficult. We've winnowed our review down to nine packages: Capable video editing programs that can also write to DVD, and DVD authoring programs that have limited editing capabilities and also write to DVD. The video editing programs we reviewed all output to videotape; to compressed, Internet-friendly files; or to a DVD. The DVD authoring programs output to DVD only. (Our evaluations are summarized in this chart.)

DVD authoring programs such as Pinnacle Expression, InterVideo WinDVD Creator Plus, and CyberLink PowerProducer offer limited options to edit the video and customize DVD menus. Other programs, such as Pinnacle Studio 8, provide more flexibility, with more-complex tools for tweaking the video and the DVD menus.

We tested the packages by using them to copy footage from a DV camcorder to DVD and assessing how well each handled the job. We also evaluated each program's feature set and ease of use. Finally, we lab-tested how long each package took to convert the video to MPEG-2, the format used on DVD movie discs.

Of our two Best Buys, Ulead's DVD MovieFactory 2 uses a simple interface and strong editing tools, making it a solid choice for DVD authoring, while Pinnacle Studio 8's robust set of tools provides great control over editing video before burning it to DVD.