The Rating Scale Breakdown:
- 0 – 0.5 – Abysmal
- 1.0 – 1.5 – Terrible
- 2.0 – 2.5 – Poor
- 3.0 – 3.5 – Average
- 4.0 – 4.5 – Great
- 5.0 – Excellent
- Undetermined – Too soon to tell or lacking evidence to provide a solid answer
- Not Tested – Has yet to be requested or there is some limitations to prevent accurate test results
- N/A – Not Available and or Not Applicable to this program
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V. 3.0 F – Aimersoft’s DVD Creator for Windows (2.6.4) Review Template
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Price: $39.95 USD/CAD
A. Installation Aimersoft’s DVD Creator for Windows – 4.5 “Great” – Pretty, fast, never conflicted with other programs during installation, and never crashed or timed out on me.
B. Un-installing Aimersoft’s DVD Creator for Windows – 4.5 “Great” – Safe, simple, seemed a little slower than the installation and removed the program 100% from my system.
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C. Stability Of Program – 4.5 “Average” – Completely stable, never crashed, timed out on me, works like a dream, but a dream that is real (LOL) and allowed me to perform multiple tasks at once.
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D. Detection Rate Test:
D1. Windows XP – Not Tested
D2. Windows Vista – Not Tested
D3. Windows 7 (x64) – 4.5 “Great“
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E. Speed of Project Creation – 4.0 “Great“ – To create a whole project with menus, background images, music, scene selects, and video selection is very easy, very quick, but I’ve found it tough to delete certain templates on those menus that seem to be embedded.
EE. Types Of Projects Templates – 4.0 “Great” – There are a selection of different template layouts that can work depending on the project you are creating.
F. Update Process – 3.5 “Average” – Very simple, effective, and easy to find, and will provide you with update notices when necessary.
G. Menu Creation – 4.0 “Great” – It’s very basic, quick, requires very little work, menus can be stagnate or dynamic, with test, buttons, sizes, layouts, and storyboards all optionable edits.
H. Video Editing – 4.5 “Great” – Video lengths can be trimmed down (in essence removing portions of the video). Video can also be cropped, flipped, have the aspect ratios changed between 16:9 and 4:3, you can change the Tv output from NTSC to PAL and back again, you can add multiple subtitles (from different languages), and enhance the video by adjusting settings such as the brightness, contrast, saturation and volume of the video. You can also add watermarks to your videos and edit how the watermark is viewed by adjusting the Transparency, Vertical/Horizontal Space, and size of the image.
I. Preview Project – 4.5 “Great” – You can get a live preview of the project you’ve created, and visible go through all of the menus, see all of the dynamic buttons, hear the background music and actually play any videos linked to any of the buttons and menus.
J. Burn DVD Options – 4.5 “Average” – Works very well, You can choose the folder Path (Location where your whole project is backed up once burn commences until the disc is finalized), as well as Burn the Project to Disc or Save the Project as an ISO on the PC. You get to choose what DVD Drive you’d like to use to burn the project to DVD. You can name your DVD by changing the text of the Disc Label.
K. Burn DVD – 4.5 “Great” – Projects created can burnt on to either DVD5 (Single Layer = 4.35GB) or DVD9 (Dual Layer = 8.60GB), and the time needed to burn projects on DVD will vary depending on whether you choose DVD5 or DVD9, and how big your project is (depending on how long your videos used for the DVD are).
L. Aimersoft’s Support – 4.0 “Great“ – With the paid version of the program, you get their “Online Help”, “Support Center” or “Contact Customer Service“.
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My Overall Score: 55.5/65
85.3 % = A
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My Final Verdict: Aimersoft’s DVD Creator for Windows is an effective. easy, professional program, a lot of it is much better than other DVD creation software programs I use. It allows you to create multiple menus per DVD project, and even allows you to use a different template per menu, with different button layouts, text options and background music on each template.
You can even make the template menus dynamic or stagnant, meaning that if dynamic, the buttons will display a live preview of the video attached to it, and you can even make the background image for that menu dynamic as well, meaning that the background can also display a live preview of the video along with dynamic button preview.
Plus the ability to edit the video before burning it to the disc is a welcome addition, especially with the ability to trim, crop or flip the videos. It’s also really nice to see a program that will allow you to change the aspect ratio of the video before burning it to a disc in the same program, as well as changing the TV output between NTSC and PAL, enhancing the video with options like saturation, contrast, brightness, volume and subtitle support are all welcome additions. Then if you’re making a professional video, the ability to add a watermark to the video, and how it is displayed on the video are also welcome additions.
Then you get the ability to display your project (menus/videos and all) in a live preview before burning it to a DVD, so you can accurately see what everything looks like and make minor adjustments before burning commences.
When it came to burning the DVD itself, you get the ability to choose where you want a backup to be saved on your system until the DVD burn is completed, you can also save the entire project in DVD format (as an ISO file), as well as the choice to change the output of the DVD between DVD5 (Single Layer) and DVD9 (Dual Layer), but the only thing you can’t really change is the speed of the DVD burn, which depends on how much video content (equals space used on the disc) you want to be burned, and that is unavoidable. Highly recommended!
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Here is a link to download Aimersoft’s DVD Creator for Windows:
1. http://www.aimersoft.com/download/dvd-creator.html (Aimersoft’s DVD Creator for Windows Download Page)
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Till The Next Review,
Matt Stanyon
The Computer Savvy Weblog 