I just wanted to pass on my experience with Ulead DVD Moviefactory 5. Although the software has a very “wizard” interface it’s a surprisingly powerful application. For one thing it can encode audio in AC3, which will save space so you can encode your video at a higher bitrate.

Version 5 now allows you to encode with two-pass VBR.

Another feature which I seem to have discovered lately is that it will import DVD’s and allow you to do multi-trims, create menus and author all without re-encoding the video files.

ABout the only bug I have discoverd is that it doesn’t quite save projects correctly. You need to save your menu as template if you ever want to use it again.