Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus is a competent, occasionally
interface-challenged program. It's a good choice for technical users who
don't mind rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty.
Those seeking the ultimate in ease of use with near-equal functionality,
though, should consider the revitalized Pinnacle Studio, and power
users should lean towards our Editors' Choice, Premiere Elements.
With highly efficient capture and trimming tools, VideoStudio knows how
to make a great first impression. Like many programs, it offers a
one-button feature for transferring DV tape to DVD. You can also,
however, scan a DV tape for scene changes at roughly 8X speed (it worked
through a 45-minute test tape in just under 6 minutes). Once that
process is finished, you can select and capture just the scenes you
want, which I found to be a great convenience. Anyone who's burning
every single second of footage they shoot to DVD is either creating some
very tedious DVDs or is a great in-camera editor the likes of which
hasn't been seen since Alfred Hitchcock. When importing a large file
into your project, VideoStudio can split scenes with time code or by
scene changes, and it's one of the few editors with a multitrim tool
that lets you quickly cut out sequences from inside a larger file.
VideoStudio's timeline has seven video tracks plus a title track, which
should be plenty for virtually all projects; few users really need the
99 tracks Premiere Elements offers. Picture-in-picture options are good;
you can resize and distort your PIPs at will and create a frame of any
color as well. But VideoStudio's chroma-key effect performed poorly in
our tests, especially compared with that of Premiere Elements, and
workflow was clumsy, making the program a poor choice for real-world
green- and blue-screen applications.
I found the app's corrective effects generally quite good in testing.
The new color-correction feature performed well in auto mode, with
convenient manual controls for gamma, contrast, brightness, saturation,
and hue. Ulead's Auto Exposure filter adeptly brightened the faces in
our backlighted test clips while retaining good exposure in the
background, but not quite as effectively as Premiere Elements' fabulous
Shadow/Highlight tool.
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