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Dazzle DVD Complete Deluxe

Create high quality DVDs from your home movie footage

Dazzle’s DVD Complete Deluxe is aimed at beginners and more experienced users alike and is capable of producing excellent results with very little effort.

Wizards

The key to the program is its series of wizards. At their most simple they essentially collate the video footage, convert it to the right format for DVD and produce a menu based on over 20 templates. They continue up in complexity with types such as Business and Hollywood with each adding more features. At the top end you can have introduction clips (where you’d normally see the copyright message prior to the menus appearing), out-takes, scripts, stills gallery and even subtitles.

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<-A sample menu

 Once the wizard has done its task, you can edit the resulting menus using a variety of tools and options. Most aspects can be tweaked and fiddled with although you can’t move any buttons that are part of the layout. A pity. The wizard also produces jewel-case layouts and disk labels for printing. The system automatically chooses stills from the video footage to  adorn these although you can change these to other frames if desired. 

Matching cover->

 Once you have finished designing the DVD you can run it in a simulator to see how the final disc will look. Here you can check the menus, make sure you are happy with the video quality and generally confirm everything looks OK.

It’s all very straightforward and the supplied but rather thin manual does cover the basics so you should have no problem getting up to speed.

Conversion

DVD Complete Deluxe can cope with source files in a variety of formats. As part of the disk compilation process it converts these to the appropriate MPEG2 format for the finished DVDs. Unfortunately, not all these stages can be run as a batch and when adding new clips, you have to wait for each one to be processed before adding the next. Whilst this is quite fast compared to other programs, you’ll be glad of a fast processor at this stage!

There are lots of adjustments to be had when converting and you can often produce very good results or longer playback times without too much trouble.

<-Encoder options

 Burning

Once your project is complete you can choose to either burn a DVD image on your hard disk or to create a real DVD in your DVD burner. Whilst the program claims to support all DVD formats, unless there has been a recent update, DVD+R is not yet supported although DVD+RW is.

Conclusion

Dazzle’s DVD Complete Deluxe is a great way to create your own DVDs. There are cheaper options although most aren’t as flexible as DVD Complete and don’t offer the fine tuning of the menu structures. It is especially recommended for beginners as it really is as simple as clicking a few buttons if you rely on the wizards to do all the work. We would also take the minimum hardware specs with a pinch of salt. We tested it on a 1Ghz Pentium 3 with 384Mb of RAM and it felt like it wanted a lot more grunt to really fly. A demo is available from www.dazzle.com. Finally, as always seems to be the case these days, make sure you download the latest patches before using the program as the updates fix quite a few nasty bugs.

Iain Laskey

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