Product Reviews

The following are some of the software products reviewed by OMUG members

Word Perfect Office Suite 12 Review by Arlene G. Kapner

NTI CD & DVD MAKER 7: Titanium Suite: http://www.ntius.com/

The list of all of the programs in the Suite: http://www.ntius.com/cd_dvd_maker.asp

NTI CD&DVD-Maker™ 7 Titanium Suite - delivers the ultimate in CD and DVD burning. Experience the full potential of your CD and DVD writers through NTI CD&DVD-Maker™ 7 Titanium Suite's full featured multimedia tools and back up features.

This software has been offered to OMUG for review, and I am the lucky one chosen to review it. Most of us have CD and DVD burners and software, and this program has all of the basics. It actually has 9 products in it, that are integrated, so it does just about anything you might want to do to create DVDs and CDs.

I had a specific purpose in mind that I was hoping this software would do for me. I have a DVD that was made from a 16 mm movie that was done of our wedding in 1965. It has no music, and is just a nice movie, with nothing extra. I put the movie on DVD last year with the hope of being able to spice it up a bit, and add some personal photos.

This program, one of the Suite programs is called HomeVideo-Maker.

First of all, it let me import the whole movie into the program, and then created individual scenes with the movie. I learned how to add transitions between the scenes, which allowed for some special effects. John Acocks send me great background music which I likewise imported into the DVD I created. I am still playing around with some of the special effects within the program, but so far it has been easy to use. I was able to lighten up some of the darker slides, and improve on the color. The slides from the clip end up on a Storyboard and then you can see the progress you’ve made.

This project has been a lot of fun for me. Walt and I were married over 40 years ago, and many of the folks in this movie are dead now. It has been nice to see those faces again, and remember this important event this way. The whole suite was very easy to install, and a fun to use.

The documentation with the software was pretty basic, especially for the Home Video-Maker. I went onto the web and found an upgrade to the program, and a few other tips for using the program, and managed to accomplish quite a bit.

You can utilize videos, clips from video cameras, clips from DVDs, and just about any other source you wish to use.

I plan to demonstrate this program at a future OMUG meeting, and I think you will appreciate how easy this is to use…

System Requirements:

Windows XP Home or Professional

2.0 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or better

Available USB 2.0 port

AGP Graphics Card

Sound Card for audio playback

CD-ROM for software installation

Internet access to www.TitanTV.com

4 GB for approximately every 2 hours of video recording time

http://www.ntius.com/cd_dvd_maker.asp

September, 2006: Cost: Buy CD-ROM $79.99

Reviewer: Pat Sonnenstuhl, OMUG Webmaster