Ulead CD & DVD PictureShow 4

A Review by Howard Steller

It was impressive how easy it was to produce a professional looking slide show, with music, that was entertaining and pleasing to watch. I wasn’t expecting such good results on my first try, but I have to give all the credit to Ulead PictureShow 4.

Installation:

The installation was easy, but I would have preferred a menu with check boxes, to select which programs to install, similar to what Microsoft uses for Office installations. That would be less tedious than being returned to the main menu at the end of each installation to install the next program, i.e. CD & DVD Pictureshow 4, ULead Photo Explorer 8.5, Ulead Utilities, etc.

Starting a Project:

The program made it easy to search for and add the pictures for the slide show. There was also sound advice provided to “Always save your project for future editing by selecting “FILE: SAVE”. How many times do files get lost when this advice is not taken!

The Slide Toolbar was very good. A picture could be rotated within the program without exiting to fix it. Adding and deleting pictures, sorting, Express Fix (a lot of options to fix), adding a description, restore, show/hide file name, and changing the thumbnail size were all useful, helpful, and easy to use.

Theme:

I didn’t see the Output Format selection box right away. If I hadn’t been reading the manual, I may not have noticed it without knowing it was there. I think a dialog box asking what format is being used would be better, or, at least putting it higher up so it’s more visible. The capacity bar is nice to have too: it shows how much space is being used and how much is left.

Gallery, Menu & Slideshow Tabs:

The only selections I could find were in Free Download 1. Fantasyland, General, Holidays, Special Events, Sports & Holidays were all empty. After I selected one, I clicked on the Edit your slide show selection button, and the progress bar kept going across continuously. The Manual didn’t say anything about this, so I stopped it and started over. I didn’t experiment with the Motion Menu. I was happy to see the ability to show or hide the slideshow number. I played the Slideshow and it worked flawlessly. The loop audio feature was nice also. Since the audio initially ended before the slideshow, this fixed the timing problem. The default transitions were very adequate. I liked the pan and zoom, the ability to add text and background, and being able to adjust the transparency.

Burn Tab:

The Burn CD function has a lot of features the big guys have, like Roxio and Nero: more than I would expect to see on this type of program. A lot of thought went into enabling the user to select the drive, number of copies, create DVD Folders and Create an Image. The program showed not only the Disc Space needed, but it also showed space available on the Hard Drive: very nice!

Output Options:

The Output Options allowed the user to select the Drive and Recording Speed, as well as which files to include on the disc. Perform write testing was there for those that like to use it. Enable buffer under run protection was also an option.

Conclusion:

Overall, Ulead PictureShow 4 is a nice package. It allows a slide show to be made quickly and easily. The more extensive features can be learned over time if desired, but I found I could load my pictures, create a nice flowing slideshow with music and burn it to a CD without having to spend a lot of time learning a complicated program.

CD & DVD PictureShow 4

Ulead Systems, Inc.

$29.99

http://www.ulead.com/dps/runme.htm