software - TotalBurn Platinum Suite

If you want to burn CDs and DVDs and work with digital media, Broderbund's TotalBurn Platinum Suite offers five programs to take care of your video editing, photo editing, label creation and media organization needs. Based on our evaluation, however, the capabilities here are probably not worth the price of admission.

NTI CD-Maker 5.5 offers CD and DVD burning capabilities. Using this program, you can backup data files onto a CD or DVD disc, convert music MP3 files and burn them onto CDs, and create video CDs and super video CDs. The program is powerful and easy to use, however, you can often find similar capabilities in the programs that already come with most CD and DVD burners.

The MovieShop Select program offers video-editing features to capture digital video from DV camcorders, perform basic video editing, and add transitions, titles, music and special effects. While the program generally worked as advertised, we found it grossly underpowered.

After combing the help pages, we never managed to copy and paste, and re-arrange video sequences, a fundamental video-editing capability. And since the program lacks a manual, as all the programs do, you're forced to continually refer to the online help, which makes the barely intuitive program that much harder to learn and use.

Even worse, MovieShop Select kept asking if we wanted to upgrade to the full version of MovieShop, which makes us conclude that the program only exists in this suite to encourage you to pay for the upgrade. While this may be fine for software that comes bundled with hardware, this is not what we expect in a program that we've paid for.

The remaining three programs include The Print Shop Photo Workshop to edit and enhance digital photos; The Print Shop CD Label Creator to make CD labels and jewel inserts; and MediaShop to organize digital photos, videos, and music files. These programs offer good basic features.

In the end, we can't recommend TotalBurn Platinum Suite, especially at its $99.99 suggested retail price. The video-editing capabilities are completely inadequate and many of you already have solid CD-burning capabilities with the programs that came with your CD and DVD burners. In fact, if we paid almost $100 for this program, we would have felt totally burned.

1/24/03 www.daytrum.com Editorial Staff

If you want to burn CDs and DVDs and work with digital media, Broderbund's TotalBurn Platinum Suite offers five programs to take care of your video editing, photo editing, label creation and media organization needs. Based on our evaluation, however, the capabilities here are probably not worth the price of admission.