CyberLink PowerProducer 3 Deluxe Review

Right-to-disc

The description of this feature sounds very interesting indeed. Now let us see if it is really as powerful as it sounds.

The first screen after clicking on the write-to-disc button enables us to choose the DVD recorder, provides us with all the necessary information on the target disc and gives us the information which types of DVD media are supported. We also get a warning that the resulting disc isn’t editable if we decide to record the content to a DVD+/-R disc.

If the disc already contains some data, then we can also see the current playback length.

After these basic settings are done we just jump to the next screen.

We see two tabs on the left when the wizard is opened. Here we can make the recording configuration, such as start point, stop point, volume label… and more for encoding, the important settings like video quality, resolution and audio format.

The preview window with the controls at the bottom, which can control the camcorder directly, can be used to navigate through the tape stored video file. 

Back to the tabs and let us take a closer look into the features, which are offered on the configuration tab.

There isn’t really much to configure. On this tab we just need to define which format we are recording and also the way we want to record. We can record the whole tape or we can set the mark in/mark out times in case that we want to record just a part of the tape. Since we are able to control the camcorder via the software, the setting of mark in and mark out is easy. The only negative thing is that there is no option to select multiple time windows at once. So we would have to do the whole procedure again when we want to record additional scenes onto the disc.

The last settings to do here are selection of the location where the disc will be played and we can enter the disc volume label and the disc name.

After this is done we change to the settings tab.

Besides the setting of the recording format, which is only necessary when we record to a DVD+/-RW, we should set the Quality, Resolution and Audio format at this point. If we like to have a menu on the resulting disc, then can we also select a menu and the menu heading.

Well, all the settings are done and we can start with the recording process.

Like we see in other applications, we can follow the process via the preview window and a status box. The encoding and recording process for a full 60min MiniDV tape has finished after approximately 61 minutes, which is about the time required when we transfer the content of the tape to our hard disc, without any editing and encoding steps.

Well, the disc is created. Now let us find out how the disc can be edited.