July, 2006

By: Rich Covars

I recently finished a project where I had to burn a bunch of DVDs. This wasn't just any project, it was my and my wife's wedding video. We had decided to make a slide show collage of the entire weekend and put it on a DVD to send to all of our guests as a thank you.

Everything went very smooth during the process of making and editing the DVD. The programs iMovie and iDVD were amazing. The project came to a screeching halt when it came to designing the label of the DVD and the design of the jewel case cover. I didn't have any software and I was at a loss.

Most of the software I tried was very painful to use. It was either very slow, poorly laid out (yes, user experience matters) or both. After much trial and error, I finally found a piece of software that made passable labels. I wish BeLight would have had a product sooner.

After I reviewed Business Card Composer, you can't imagine how excited I was that BeLight had a new offering — a disc label designing application.

Disc Cover, as the name implies, is for designing media labels. You can design labels for CDs and DVDs, jewel case inserts, even DVD cover inserts among others.

When you open Disc Cover, you are greeted with a familiar looking navigation window, Disc Cover Assistant.

The Disc Cover Assistant window has two elements. On the left is a list of all of the sample designs. The right is the active design window. You get to see in real time what the sample designs look like. In the upper left hand corner of the active design window is a selector pain that allows you to choose the type of media you want to design — cd with list, jewel case cover, jewel case back cover, cd no list, and jewel cover with no list.

I want to take a moment here to talk about the templates. BeLight has included many templates for just about any application you might have. Whether it is data, photos, music or whatever. The templates are very professional looking and provide a great avenue to get the creative juices flowing. With 70+ templates to choose from, you would be hard pressed to not find a starting place. You can also design and save your own templates as well.

Once you select a template to start from you are presented with a media window. The media window is specific to the type of template that you chose in the previous window. If you chose a music template, you are presented with an iTunes media browser. If you choose a photo template, you are presented with an iPhoto browser. If you select data, you are presented with a finder window to select files to add to the project. Don't let the assistant fool you. You are not constrained to these options. If you select general or blank, you are presented with the main design window without choosing any media files to add. Our project is a music project, so the media window looks like the following:

Pressing the finish button takes you to the main design window.

The main window is split into two panes: the media pain and the design pane. The media pane has tabs for music, photos, movies, data and clip art.

Like Business Card Composer, Disc Cover comes with a generous amount of clip art for your designs (including a healthy amount of background images). The retail boxed edition comes with 23000+ images (the download version comes with around 900 – You can upgrade to the boxed edition later for $5 + Shipping and Handling).

Like Business Card Composer, the main design window has tabs for the foreground and background images. This allows you to rapidly audition background images and clip art for your design without disturbing the other element. The main window also has a button to hide and reveal the media browser. This allows you a little more room to work.

The media design selection panel is still in the top right corner of the design pane. In addition to the pictured icons, there is now a pull down menu that has selections for just about any type of media you can imagine, even business card CDs.

The printing window is very well designed. BeLight has designed a straight forward, but still powerful interface here. The paper list has been pared down to the most recent paper types used (although, you can also add paper types to this list through a pull down that lists nearly every type of label ever made).

After you select your paper type, you simply drag and drop elements where they belong. You can make more than one CD design at a time. This is very convenient especially if you can fit multiple labels in one sheet. The labels don't even need to be the same.

Just like Business Card Composer, BeLight has designed a very powerful but easy to use interface for doing a task that can sometimes be very daunting. It is difficult to find any faults in this application as well, but like BCC, the addition of ruler elements in the main design window would be very helpful when laying out your designs.

If you are frustrated with the options out there for making media labels, you won't be disappointed if you give Disc Cover a try.

Disc Cover is $39.95 for the boxed edition or $34.95 for the download edition. Be sure to check out BeLight Soft's website for acedemic and user group pricing.

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