Great Capture and Editing Functions

Nice Transitions and Special Effects

We've always liked VideoStudio's transitions and special effects, and Ulead has added several useful baubles in this release, like mask-based transitions, and flashback transitions that produce a glowing, dreamy look. You can now add Flash animations to the overlay track, creating your own or using canned animations that Ulead supplies.

Also new is the ability to distort your video to fit within Flash-based overlays, so you can rotate your video to fit in a tilted picture frame, for example. Though VideoStudio forces you to work within small filter control windows, you can set an unlimited number of key frames, providing fine creative control. Editing is aided by a huge preview window and FireWire output that lets you preview on a TV connected to your DV camcorder.
 

Auto Exposure Tool

VideoStudio's Auto Exposure tool successfully performed well with backlighted videos, and the Auto Level tool worked well with videos shot indoors under inadequate lighting, two very common problems.
 

Movie Wizard

The included Movie Wizard is a nice idea. It allows you to make a stylish movie by mixing up pan and zoom effects and transitions and synchronizing the slide show to the beat of the background music. You can choose from preset styles such as romantic, travel, celebration and more. Other features include:

• 20+ Stylish Theme Templates - Choose from templates complete with music, titles and transitions

• Auto Remove Poorly Shot Video - The Movie Wizard automatically identifies poorly shot video clips

• Add Smart Pan and Zoom to Slideshows - Smart Pan and Zoom automatically recognizes key characteristics like faces and pans across and zooms in on details
   

Shortcomings

The biggest deficit of Ulead VideoStudio 9 involves DVD authoring. Though the templates were good and customization options plentiful, Ulead doesn't save authoring input with the project file. So if you take an hour or so selecting chapter points, label your buttons and customize your titles, then burn the DVD and find a spelling error, you're back at square one.
 

Conclusion

Overall, Ulead VideoStudio 9 is one of the absolute best video editing
software programs available on the market today. The software is so easy to use, and the tutorial has been written with the end user in mind. Between the ease of use, and the powerful features of Ulead VideoStudio 9, even amateurs have the ability to make professional quality videos in no time.

Pinnacle Studio is a popular video editing program that allows you to easily capture video from camcorders into your computer. You can add great-looking transitions, special effects and background music to your plain old home videos. Start converting your videos into Hollywood productions now!

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