Product Reviews

The tenth incarnation of Ulead's entry-level editing app is a significant step. Following Pinnacle's strategy, there are now two editions - a basic one and a new Plus version costing £15 more. As with Pinnacle Studio, most of the best new features are reserved for the Plus edition. Not surprisingly, HDV support is one of the headliners, alongside the ability to burn to HD DVD once the drives arrive on the market. You can only create HD DVDs in MPEG2 format, but resolutions up to the full 1,920 x 1,080 are allowed.

To assist with editing high-definition footage, VideoStudio has borrowed the Smart Proxy system from MediaStudio Pro 8, using lower resolutions while editing. It helped tremendously in use, although you need to ensure that it's turned on and set up correctly before you start dropping video onto the timeline, as files already there won't be converted. When you output your final movie, the original full resolution files are used for rendering the finished product.

The other major addition is extra video tracks, which you can add and remove using the Overlay Track Manager. In the past, you could just add one picture-in-picture or chroma-key track, but now you can have up to six. This isn't as many as Adobe Premiere Elements 2, but it beats Pinnacle Studio hands down and should be enough for most non-professionals. We found VideoStudio didn't exactly offer a real-time engine, degrading frame rates when more than a couple of layers of DV were superimposed using a picture-in-picture effect. But performance was adequate for editing previews. You can always use Smart Proxy if you want faster previewing frame rates. However, although you can keyframe filters, you still can't do this with picture-in-picture effects. You can add simple entrance and exit motion and create static distortions, but drop shadows aren't possible either.

Ulead has also beefed up the audio provision with a surround-sound mixer and support for outputting Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks. However, the surround-sound mixer only allows you to mix audio from the first two video tracks, the narration track and the music track. You can pan your audio around the surround image, but the only way to animate this is via live mixing.

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There are no rubber bands or onscreen curves to provide a visual representation of the motion of your sound source, so if adjustment is required you'll need to go back to live mixing. In this respect, Pinnacle's implementation in Studio is easier to use.

VideoStudio 10 Plus includes a number of other useful extras. MPEG4 output is now supported. The new Export to Mobile Device option has specific presets for creating MPEG4, compatible with Apple's Video iPod and Sony's PSP, as well as WMVs for smartphones and Pocket PCs. Although the Multi-trim tool has been included since VideoStudio 8, this now also has Ad Zapper at its disposal, as first seen in Ulead's DVD MovieFactory 5. Ad Zapper automatically scans a video file recorded from TV and finds what it thinks are the ad breaks, making it easy to delete them. Curiously, you can only use Multi-trim with videos on the first track. To round off, InterVideo's WinDVD 7 DVD player software is included as well.

However, there are a few extras that users of the standard version can enjoy too. The new Anti-shake filter effectively reduces the results of wobbly camera work, although like all such filters it crops into the image to perform its duties. But unlike Pinnacle Studio's equivalent, you can both customise the level of stabilisation and vary the amount of cropping up to 20%. Enhance Lighting automatically brings out areas of shadow without burning out the highlights in the process, while the Fish Eye filter creates an effect like the lens of the same name.

Ulead has also changed the UI arrangement. Four presets are provided, with a less dominant preview window than in previous versions and more space for all the tools. For disc authoring, with DVD Movie Factory 5's engine built-in you get much more design control. SmartScene menus and menu transitions are available, and you can now resize, position and rotate buttons and text.

Users who purchase either version of Ulead VideoStudio 10 before 20 June direct from Ulead will also receive a free six-month Star User Account on DropShots (www.dropshots.com), a video-hosting and sharing service. However, you'll have to upload the videos manually, as Neptune MediaShare (www.neptune.com) remains the only online service you can upload to directly from the editing timeline.

The Plus edition has remarkable editing power for under £50 and, while the standard version doesn't feel like a huge step forward, it's still a worthy contender. Adobe's Premiere Elements 2 still offers a more finely honed toolset for multitrack editing, but most will find VideoStudio easier to use. Although the standard version remains superb value, we recommend VideoStudio 10 Plus as the better deal.