DVD X Maker

Rating:
Summary: Great program for the price
Review: DVD X Maker is the same program that used to ship with the Dazzle Hollywood Bridge, except that it was called DVD Complete. 321 Studios must have acquired the rights to the program. It doesn't do everything, but I have had no problems capturing from a VCR or analog video camera. I use it on a Dell Inspiron 8600 with 7200 rpm 60 gig hard drive, 512 RAM and 1.4 Ghz Centrino processor. It would probably work better on a desktop computer with a faster processor, more memory and a separate hard drive to capture to. This is well worth the price!

Rating:
Summary: how bad can it [ just bad]
Review: got a 321studio x maker, boy did deliver. an how it delived? let me tell you. help, what help! after about a week just removed it. could not get it to copy a movie, could not get any help from 321 studio. went an got windvd creator 2 platnum at amazon at half the price. down loads from dv recorder [sony] burns moveis to dvd or to vcr

Rating:
Summary: Waste of money!!!!!
Review: I bought this product hoping to get a better program than what I was using.It sounded really good but it never stated I couldn't use my usb capture device.What a waste,and support has much to be desired.Save your money.

Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: Ok, got this product in hopes that I could capture some video footage from my Sony Digital 8 handycam. After purchasing the software, found out that I needed to get a capture card to make it work.

Afterwards, I looked at the editing features. Basically, how you take the video is how your video is basically going to look. The features are rather poor, and the "special" editing tools are near non-existent. All this program really does is create menus, add your video, and allows for special stuff (ie outtakes, alternate endings etc.) that you can add in. It does not allow you to edit your video files like adding a fade or transition stuff.

I just ordered Screenblast Movie Studio. Hopefully that will be better for me. As for DVD X Maker...was not what I was looking for.

Rating:
Summary: The AWFUL TRUTH
Review: The AWFUL TRUTH

It's hard to imagine that the same firm that produced the renowned DVD X Copy series software also produced this Edsel. Five interactions with their customer service yielded zero helpful info, so I researched DVD X Maker and found: It has some wonderful features, but it seems that management forced a release on their technical staff before the product was ready. The AWFUL TRUTH is that this software cannot work without a video capture card...and there is no manufacturer on earth that has ever released a video capture card that will work with this software. 100% of the users of this product must get their video onto their computer using other software, THEN they can begin using DVD X Maker. Hope 321 Studios has an update soon that it includes a published list of compatible video capture cards; right now, there aren't any.

Rating:
Summary: Even better than I had anticipated!!
Review: Wow, I am impressed. I was expecting this product to be just another DVD creation program that would not be as good as advertised, but I decided to buy it directly from 321 Studios through a website download, because they offer an unconditional money back guarantee (no risk at all since it was a download).

I first tried using DVD x Maker to capture my video from my digital camcorder (through my ATI all-in-wonder video card). Worked great. However, keep in mind that with this software you cannot do any video editing besides "trimming" the start end end of the capture. For this reason, I am sticking to my old software (Ulead Video Studio) to to my capturing, editing, etc.)

DVD x Maker, however, seems to be a very powerful program in terms of what it allows you to do with the actual creation of the DVD (menus, overtures, music, etc.) My resulting discs look great on my TV afterwards.

Now when it comes to MPEG-2 compression, I am normally very picky with the quality because I play my DVD's on an HDTV so all defects are apparent. Before I bought DVD x Copy, I was using one program to capture (Ulead Video Studio), one to do the MPEG encoding (Tsunami MPG Encoder), and one to burn the DVD's (Sonic MyDVD). After researching the subject, I had decided that the Tsunami software did the best job of MPEG-2 encoding. However, it took my computer (2.4GHz) about 35 hrs to encode a 2-hr home video. DVDxMaker will do the same job in about 4 hours, and yield equal (if not better) results. Not what I expected at all.

My menus look great. The provided themes allow you to quickly create a great professional look, easily, and even add chapter points wherever you want. And all your menus can have motion thumbnail images, or even the full screen! Looks excellent. And what's great is that even when you load one of the pre-made templates for menus, you can completely customize it yourself if you so desire, by adding/removing/repositioning buttons, changing text fonts, adding text boxes, changing music, background images or video, etc.

When I bought DVDxMaker I thought I would probably be retuning it for the money back guarantee, but I was wrong! This is an excellent program for MPEG-2 encoding, DVD menu creation and burning. However, you might still want to stick to another of your favorite programs for the capturing if you have problems with DVDxMaker, and definitely for the editing process if you need to do anything more than trimming off the beginning and end of your video clips.

I would recommend this to pretty much anyone, regardless of whether you are a beginner at creating DVD's, or have done it before, as long as you keep in mind that you may still need to use other software for video editing (re-arranging clips, adding text, special effects, etc)