(andPOP) - My experiences with productivity suites have, for the most part, been positive. I’ve spent hours with Adobe’s Creative Suite, Apple’s Final Cut Suite, and several other multi-application bundles and walked away a satisfied customer. The success of these best-selling software suites is largely dependent on one immensely important factor: integration.
Cyberlink Software, it appears, didn’t get the memo.
Their newest product DVD Suite Ultra version 6 is billed as an unbeatable collection of DVD-based applications. The suite includes applications designed for video editing, burning and backup production, movie playback, and label printing, but performs these tasks without any sense of direction or coherence.
It seems that Cyberlink has simply bundled a handful of their applications together and called it a suite. Each piece of software acts as its own individual entity, with individual menu bars, UI’s, and keyboard commands. The spastic nature of the differing interfaces is incredibly frustrating. Moving from application to application is clunky and counterintuitive.
I installed DVD Suite Ultra on a top-of-the-line Vista-based laptop, whose specs far exceeded Cyberlink’s recommendations. Needless to say, it was one of the strangest installation processes I’ve ever experienced. After surpassing Microsoft’s incessantly redundant “Allow” or “Deny” installation messages, the process began, but instead of installing software, it decided to start an uninstall process for software I’d never installed. I watched in disbelief as several uninstall processes ran lethargically for 15 minutes, hogging my systems resources. After 40 painfully long minutes, DVD Suite Ultra was successfully installed.
The suite works through a handy little task-based launcher. If you want to burn a backup DVD, or do some video editing, clicking on the accompanying task launches the appropriate application. It’s pretty effective for beginners, as it highlights a programs capabilities without any prior knowledge, making the initial learning curve relatively flat. When the program launches, though, users are forced to familiarize themselves with badly-designed interfaces. One application, MediaShow, looked like one of those over-the-top Windows Media skins where nothing is labeled correctly. Yikes.
The video-editing component PowerDirector is a simple program centred around the timeline format common to most editing applications. It’s pretty obvious that Cyberlink looked to the simplicity of Apple’s iLife suite for their inspiration, but they managed to mimic with little success.
PowerDirector is bundled with several pre-made transitions and video effects, but they all have a distinctly mid-90’s music video cheese factor to them. These presets can’t match Apple’s professionally designed templates in iMovie. I was impressed with the rendering speed of effects, though; they rendered over my clips almost instantaneously. My first two attempts to render a finished video into an .AVI caused the program to lock up and crash.
Something even more troubling happened when I tried to export my project as an iPod video file. “Your version of DVD suite needs to be upgraded to perform this export” read the popup. This came as a surprise, especially since I was using the Cyberlink’s most expensive and complete software suite.
As a whole, DVD Suite Ultra is nothing more than a textbook example of a software collection that does many things but does none of them well. The lack of uniformity in the interfaces is crippling. If you’re looking for productivity software, you’re better off with products from Adobe and Apple.
