Ulead Videostudio 7

My projects are only simple: create photo slideshows with background music, titles, credits, and some interesting transition effects.I have Windows Movie Maker (WMV), but can't use it to burn AVI to DVD so I bought this VS7 primarily for that function and it works great.It's simple enough IMO to use although WMV feels easier for makingphoto slideshow projects. Got the software for $8.50 with S&H so it's worth it for the simple projects.

I need to edit my old VCR tape recordings after copying them to HD. This does that job OK.

I am back to Ulead Vis. Studio after having tried Pinnacle version 8I got Ulead VS Version 5 free with a Firewire board and was getting tired of its limitations so when Pinnacle version 8 came out with great reviews I bought it and was disappointed. So I bought Ulead VisualStudio version 7. Pinnacle 8 wouldn't read some of my AVI or MPEG files (Windows Media Player, Realplayer, and Quicktime would) but would read others. I guess you have to load it with Pinnacle for it to read the AVIs and MPEGs.Video editing takes a lot of CPU power with either editor and my new AMD Athlon 2400 is about adequate - any less and I wouldn't try it. With VS version 7 I was able to make some VCDs (320x240 resolution), Super VCDs (640x480 resolution), and WMVs (higher compression than MPEG), and played them on my DVD player and emailed them to friends with good results.For example, in the Pinnacle product, you have a single brightness control but in VS 7 you have to apply a filter with confusing controls - the default is to start bright and end the clip on the brightest setting. Most of the time, you want the whole clip brighter but when you fool around with the controls you realize the VS filter allows you to set the brightness at any setting at any point in the clip so it can start at one setting, smoothly go to a higher setting 3 seconds into the clip and then smoothly back to a lower setting. There seem to be no real limits on the number of different points you can set in a clip. This works with all the transition settings of which there are a fair few.The many transitions available between clips are also quite nice, and reasonably flexible, though I think crossfade is the simplest and best - otherwise you distract the viewer with special effects instead of the video you are trying to show.When you load from your camcorder the software will automatically split it into scenes and load a transition (your choice or randomly selected). This is very handy.Some differences make you feel you need both software to get the best results. For slow or speeded up motion, Ulead lets you choose any %-age increase or decrease while Pinnacle limits you to specific settings, but Pinnacle allows you to opt for not smoothly interpolatig frames whch gives you a very nice effect for some sports actions.There are some other improvements I can think of but if you fool around with this you will find you can do most things pretty easily. Each filter degrades the video quality so you need to be careful with what you do.VS does some things very well, but in other cases the techniques take some getting used to. I can't afford to buy every video movie maker but Pinnacle 8 got the best reveiws in the magazines and I think Ulead VS 7 is better - for under $500 software.

I spent more than 50 hours trying to learn how to use this product and learning how to work around its bugs. I gave up and bought Sony Screenblast, which is working quite well for me. Here are some problems I had with the Ulead product:The user interface is wildly non-intuitive. Absolutely baffling. Even after 50 hours of intensive effort, I couldn't figure out its behaviors. Also, the help system was clearly tacked on as an afterthought; it's in Adobe PDF format, so you can't search it, it's hard to read, and the index is laughable. The text is completely inadequate. If you buy this product you will have to use the online web boards (which are actually quite good) to figure out how to use it.They say you can import media and edit it, but this is not actually true. It will edit mpegs captured by other tools, but when you try to burn a DVD it crashes with no diagnostics. A phone call to tech support established that you cannot render a file unless it was captured by VS (Video Studio). (There is a workaround, but the tech support guy didn't know about it.)The output audio is bad, with occasional clicks and pops inserted.On a larger project, it gets horrendously slow. (Other programs, like Screenblast, are slow to load but are quite quick once loaded.)I had one crash, after which VS was no longer able to start. I tried to uninstall so I could re-install, but that caused system errors. Fortunately the original installsheild .exe could uninstall. But this one crash cost me half a day of experimentation just to find the way to re-install.The feature set is not very rich compared to Screenblast at about the same price. I've also used ArcSoft ShowBiz, which has a lovely interface but cannot render acceptable output. And I've also used a few really low-end tools.Overall, the money I spent on VS was money flushed down the toilet. And my weeks of work were wasted -- I should have quit earlier.BTW, I have a degree in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley and have been in the software development business for 20 years, so I'm not easily intimidated by software.