Ulead VideoStudio 9.0 Video Editor Review

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(More customer reviews)ULEAD's Video Studio 9 has a lot to offer considering the under-$100 retail price, although there are a couple of annoying aspects to using it, and there is one glaring omission in it's feature set.
To start off this review, I downloaded and installed the trial versions of several video editors, so as to have a base of comparison. In addition to ULEAD VS9, I tried Roxio's and Pinnacle's video editors, Cyberlink Power Director, and Video Edit Magic - these are all in the same retail price category as VS9, between $49 and $100. I also tried a GPL freeware editor, ZweiStein Video Compositor from "T@B Software".
My computer came with two other packages, Windows Movie Maker (this comes with Windows XP) and Cyberlink Power Producer, and I already had some familiarity with those products.
What I was primarily looking for was a Video production package with more user-customizable features than Windows Movie Maker offers, especially Titles and Transitions; also more stability and reliability - I could not get WMM to compile and render a movie project longer than about 35 minutes without crashing or hanging (these hang-ups always required a full cold reboot to recover from). Power Producer isn't really a video editor, it's only function is to take finished videos, add a menu structure, and burn them to VCD or DVD.
As for the other trialware packages I downloaded:
1. Cyberlink Power Director refused to load and run, and I was not able to figure out why. My computer more than met the system requirement, so perhaps the archive got corrupted during the download? Anyway, I gave up on it after a couple of hours of non-success.
2. Roxio and Pinnacle. These are very similar, and might even be the same core program with different splash screens grafted on. They are VERY limited in what they can do, especially for the $89 price tag. Windows Movie Maker is a more robust video editor and it's free to download as long as you have Win XP. They also have a "fixed" application window size of 1024 x 768, a real annoyance on my system which usually runs at 1600 x 1200.
2. Video Edit Magic. Somewhat better features than Roxio/Pinnacle, but still not as much there as WMM.
3. ZweiStein. Unusual, non-intuitive user interface, very different from most other video editors. It was also pretty limited in capabilities, and again WMM has more features.
4. Windows Movie Maker. Looks like it could be a decent video editor if MicroSoft can get the bugs out of it in a future build. It's one serious shortcoming in features is that it's text title capabilities are all "pre-fabricated". You can only overlay text titles in positions pre-determined by the program, and only one block of text can exist within a title. You can at least change the font and color of a text block, but without the ability to position the text exactly where you want it, it's very frustrating if you have experience with top-end software like Adobe Premiere.
Okay, now on to ULEAD VS9. First the good news:
FEATURES: In terms of overall video editing capability, it shares the first place rating, with Adobe Premiere Elements, in the best-under-$100 Video editor category, for what's currently available (January 2006). It has a wide array of video filters and transition effects, probably more than most amateur and home users will ever need. It has significantly better text titling capabilities than any of the other packages I tried: In addition to the usual font and color controls, you can place multiple text blocks within a title frame, and each text block can have it's own individual color, font, size, position, transition, and animation settings. If you need better text title capability than WMM provides, ULEAD VS9 should satisfy almost any non-commercial video editing need. In addition to actual video files, VS9 can import and use almost any digital still photo image, to make title screens, or string together into a slide show.
STABILITY / RELIABILITY: No complaints here. On my AMD Athlon 1900 system, with 1500 megs of RAM and a Radeon Dual-head video card, VS9 has never crashed or hung up. The largest compilation I have tested was a project with 67 minutes of AVI video and 25 minutes of a still-image slide show. Remarkably, there were several instances of "Out of Memory" conditions while editing this video, where Windows 2000 popped up a warning dialog, and VS9 lost it's ability to preview/play the video clips. Amazingly, it never crashed or suffered a hang up - I just clicked "Okay" on the warning dialog box, saved the project to hard disk, then closed and and reloaded VS9 and reloaded my project. It always came back just as it was saved and I was able to continue working right where I left off. Note that VS9 can be configured to "auto-save" at user defined intervals, so an unexpected power failure or system crash won't cost you hours of lost work even if you forget to manually save when you broke for lunch (or whatever).
INPUT/OUTPUT: VS9 appears capable of importing most of the common Video formats, like AVI, MPG, MOV, WMV, and VOB. Outputs are the same. VOB is of course the file structure for DVD movies, and VS9 can compile and burn DVD-Video, VCD, and SVCD. I have not tested all of these, just DVD-Video. VS9 also claims to be able to capture video streams direct from your camera, or write back out to a camera, assuming your PC has the necessary video capture hardware and software (I have not tested these features personally). The files I used for my testing are AVI's, up to 650 megabytes each, from a Canon A-620 camera.
THE BAD NEWS:
I'll list the minor glitches first.
1. VS9's primary application window is hard-coded to be the maximum size of your video screen (or minimized to the task bar). Not being able to size the application window to be something less than maximum is really a pain when you want to do something else, like check e-mail or create a graphic in Photoshop for use as a title backdrop in VS9. When exporting your finished product (rendering it) to either a hard disk file or disc burner, you can not minimize VS9 so as to make room on screen for other tasks. This is really annoying, especially considering how slow the rendering engine is (more on this issue in the next section of the review).
2. If you run a dual-head, dual-monitor video system, VS9 can not be restricted to one monitor or the other, even if your video driver software has been set up to force all applications to a single monitor. It will occupy the entire desktop, spanning both monitors, regardless of what resolution you have set. It looks like the people who wrote and developed VS9 deliberately put code into the program to force this to happen; no Windows API-complient software should be able to over ride the one-monitor video driver setting, yet VS9 does.
Now for the real bad news: VS9's rendering engine is unbeliebably slow, taking not less than 8 to 10 minutes of real-time to render each minute of your compilation. In other words, if you have 60 minutes of home video clips that you would like to turn into a nicely edited DVD movie, with an audio track, text titling and scene transistions, the final output of your video will tie up your computer for as much as 10 hours! I'm not exaggerating here - my 67 minute video took 525 minutes to render out as DVD-VOB files, for a 7.8-to-1 rendering time ratio. Rendering was actually a two-step process: First, VS9 translated (rendered) the project input files (the 67 minutes worth of AVI video, JPG and BMP still frame titles, and MP3 audio backgound music) into MPEG-2 format, stored as a single 4500 megabyte MPG file in the scratch directory; this operation took 98% of the 525 minutes. Then, it took the MPEG-2 file and split it up into four 1000 megabyte chunks, re-writing them as VOB files in the VIDEO_TS directory. This only took 10 minutes or so, I guess MPG-2 to VOB doesn't require any additional rendering, just a straightforward file transfer from one folder to another. Still, the whole process took all night! On the plus side, I have to say that the image quality of the resulting VOB files was sharp and clear, as nice as any other home movies I've seen from a digital camera.
One other nice feature to counter the slowness complaint is that VS9 gives the user a lot of control over the rendering process, expecially the exact amount of MPEG compression (and resulting image quality degradation) that the user is willing to tolerate. Even better, VS9 has a command "Burn to Fit" that tells the program to calculate how much comopression to use so that the final output VOB files will just fit on a standard DVD-5 disc (or SVCD, whatever you are burning).
To compare rendering times: on the same 67 minute project that took VS9 525 minutes to produce the finished VOB files, Cyberlink PowerProducer required only 100 minutes, but the image quality was noticeably fuzzier. PowerProducer has only 3 quality levels, High, Standard, and Long-Play, representing three pre-set levels of MPEG compression. I guess the lack of user configurability allows Cyberlink's rendering engine to operate faster and more effieciently than ULEAD's.
As for the "glaring omission" noted above, VS9 appears to have no way to save the Menu and Chapter settings for your DVD. When you exit VS9, or if the computer crashes or there's a power failure, those settings are gone when you reboot the program. The dialog that opens when you click the "SHARE" command from VS9's main application window makes the DVD burning tools look like they might be a completely different program, written by a consultant rather than a ULEAD employee software engineer. Anyway, it's hard to believe that something so basic as a "save" command could have been forgotten, but I can't find one. Just remember that if you spend a lot...Read more›

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Ulead VideoStudio 9 is powerful video editing made easy. This easy-to-use software turns home videos into fun-to-watch movies! The two-step DV-to-DVD Wizard creates complete movies in a flash. With over 1000 customizable effects, beginners and seasoned users alike can achieve unique results in no time.

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