My goal was to generate a DVD from digital-camcorder footage. My 2 year-old son keeps generating tons of media, so I needed a quick-and-easy solution to stay ahead of the avalanche.

Easy Media Creator 7 (EMC7) installed with no issues. It detected my PCI-firewire card and the Sony camcorder subsequently connected to it. Capturing video from the tape was a non-issue. The PCI card and my 200GB IDE hard-drive were enough to capture the video without dropping any frames. So far, so good.

After many hours of automated capture-and-encoding, I was presented with an AVI file. EMC7 was then able to burn this to a DVD R for me. A few more minutes later, and I was rewarded with a disc that I could drop into my standalone DVD player. My 60 minutes of footage was now preserved onto a DVD. But I wanted more...

The default menu was pretty bland. Furthermore, there was only one chapter listed for the entire disc. Here's where it gets frustrating. EMC7 has a "scene detect" feature - well, I tried it. It scanned my AVI file (in real-time - arg - so that's *ANOTHER* 60 minutes) and detected the camera-breaks OK, but I couldn't integrate the "splits" into the finished product. It would be great if EMC7 could automatically detect breaks and turn these into chapters. If anyone knows how to use this feature, please let us know. As mentioned in other reviews, the online help for this was insufficient.

Another strategy would be to edit my huge AVI file into smaller AVI files (one for each chapter). Sadly, EMC7 doesn't do this, either. AVI editing must be some dark-art, because I haven't found an AVI-editor to my liking yet. If Roxio could integrate a simple AVI-editor (one that can handle cut/paste) that would be a big plus. Either that, or generate MPG instead of AVI (I have several mpg editors).

Having used Easy CD Creator in the past for CD-R duties, I had no complaints about the data-recording capabilities of EMC7.

Thanks.

Recommended: Yes