Here is a brief note about my recent experience with the trial version of ULead's DVD Factory.
The client who owns a large horse stud farm and wanted to edit and burn her digital videos onto DVD to send to breeders who were interested in her horses.

After spending the morning upgrading her PC with 2Gb RAM, Firewire, 20" widescreen LCD and a 300Gb Hard drive and then proceeded to install the ULead package.

The goal was to have something wizard and step driven that will allow my client, a non-technical person to easily create simple DVDs.

First impressions were ok. The package loaded up and I was able to get it to talk to the camera. I then uploaded some DV onto the computer and that's when it started to go wrong. My mistake was to do this in front of the client as I needed to show her how to use the package and time was running out.

I explained the concept of transferring the video so you can chop out the floor shots and other unwanted video. However, this is when it started to go pear shaped. After painstakingly using the package to choose the bits I wanted to drop out of the clip, the package simply crashed. Boom! Quit to desktop with no warning.

Ok, a freak occurence I thought, I'll start again. After doing it all again, I went to the next stage - create a menu. I selected all the correct settings but for the life of me, could not go to the next stage of burning the disk. Clicking next did nothing. I tried each option with no difference. Then the choice was taken out of my hands - the program crashed again losing all the work.

Naturally, the client was less than impressed, leaving me the task of finding another user focused DVD authoring tool.

Update as of 20/6/06

I have since found Sony's Vegas Movie Studio + DVD package and after a few hours trial, it was purchased and the client is very happy.

The software comes with easy to follow guides that had the client understanding the concepts of the timeline editing and adding a voice track onto her video. The software also seemed very stable, quick and looked clear on her 20" widescreen display.