Video/Photo Disc:

The Video/Photo disc option allows us to create our own DVD or VCD from any with a Camcorder recorded video file. This program part “only” supports CD and DVD formats and there is no support for the upcoming blue laser formats Blu-ray and HD-DVD, at least at the moment of this writing.

This section of the program targets CD/DVD burning newbie’s and the average home user who wants to create nice looking video content very fast and without much editing.

As we can see in the image above, the program offers three possible ways to create a video disc. While Video CD and DVD-Video are also offering editing functions is Burn from a existing DVD-folder only helpful when we have already “burned” a video onto our hard disc (in DVD-Video format). This feature also enables us to burn a Video-DVD from movies in DVD format which have been previously saved on the hard disc (also with other programs).

The program interface is very simple designed and it’s easy to find all features. Clicking onto the small button with the red plus symbol on it opens the window to select the video files we want to add.

The preview sections of the import window can be very helpful if we are not sure what content the selected file contains.

After we have finished to add our video files we can begin to use the editing functions.

Like already mentioned before, the program is very limited when it comes to video editing. The only available features are

• Trimming
• Create thumbnail from current frameAdjust video volume

If we now like to add some photos to our DVD we only need to click the small button under the CyberLink image in the photo section of the program.

Once the button is clicked an other window opens. Here we can add the slideshow content as well as some background music and we can also set the slide duration.

The “import” window has the same design like the “add video window”

We find once more a very limited functionality to edit our photo content. It is only possible to sort, move and rotate the images.

Also, the program only allows to add one slideshow (at least, we didn’t find the option to add an additional one)

After we have edited our video and photo content we can continue with modifying the menu. Powe2Go comes with only one menu theme, others can be purchased on the CyberLink website by clicking the “More” button.

The other functions to modify the menu are

• Background Image – Here we can choose any image/photo we like and the program will resize the image to TV screen size automatically.
• Background Music – allows us to use any audio file we like.
• Menu Caption Text – here we can enter and format the text, shown in the DVD menu.

After all settings are done and we hit the burn button the usual “Configuration/information” window opens.

Under “Video” we can make some more disc specific settings such as TV-Format, enabling the creation of a DVD-folder on the hard disc, audio format and a few other settings.

On “Common” we can enter the disc name.

On “Burner” we can make the usual, burner specific settings.

For this 30 min Video, the program required a little bit more than 1 hour to finish the whole process.

Now lets continue with copying discs…..