Let's face it: You may want a taste of high-definition DVD production, but, most likely, your major focus remains standard-def DVDs. If so, Ulead DVD MovieFactory 6 Plus may prove a good fit. The suite offers decent high-def capabilities, exceptionally attractive menu templates for standard DVDs, and some highly functional editing tools. You'll have to accept some annoyances, though, such as workflow issues when producing high-definition discs, critical functions that have awkward interfaces, and several unintuitive advanced features—particularly the still-image pan-and-zoom.

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With this suite, different applets handle authoring of DVDs, HD DVDs, and Blu-ray media. You produce Blu-ray discs (which, like those of competitors CyberLink PowerProducer 4 and MyDVD 9 Studio Premier, will have no menus) using a simple wizard in BD DiscRecorder. I tested direct capture to Blu-ray on two computers, a 2.93-GHz Core 2 Duo–based Dell Precision 390 and a dual-processor quad-core HP xw8400 workstation, both times burning to a Pioneer BDR-101A recorder. Using Verbatim BD-R and BD-RE media, I had no luck at all. I tried TDK media (with the HP xw8400 only) and had slightly better success, but lost audio sync after about 4 minutes. You can accomplish the same end by capturing data to a hard drive first and then writing to Blu-ray media—which works fine—but the process takes longer.