Ulead Video Studio 6

Video Studio 6 is ideally suited to beginners and anyone who hasn't got the patience to get to grips with more advanced packages.

A tabbed interface takes you though the process from capture and storyboarding, adding effects and overlay tracks, superimposing titles, adding background music and commentary and finally rendering and outputting to DVD and other formats.

The DV capture features are as good as anything you'll find in more advanced editors, yet very simple to use. There are three capture modes, the simplest being manual, where you just play the tape and press the Record button to begin and end capture of a clip.

Batch capture allows you to log in and out points on the tape as you watch it, then captures all the logged clips while you have a cup of tea. There's also a scene detection option that does the hard work for you, creating a new clip whenever the time and date stamp recorded by the camcorder changes.

Alternatively, you can capture one long clip and Video Studio will carve it up afterwards using the same scene detection feature. The ability to capture and transcode clips into Mpeg-2 format in one step is ideal for archiving clips to DVD, though it's best to stick with DV for editing.

Captured clips are automatically added to the storyboard area below the massive preview window. The familiar VCR control buttons which are used to control your camcorder in capture mode are used for playback of individual clips and the entire storyboard. Each clip is numbered and there's a space between adjacent clips for transitions, but there's no easy way to tell DV and Mpeg clips apart if you mix formats.

Separate Play buttons are provided for individual clips and the timeline, and the latter has two modes: instant preview and high-quality preview. The instant preview is a low-resolution non-rendered view designed to provide a quick look at your video without the delay involved in rendering. However, we found that playback was slow and jerky, and with more frames dropped than displayed it was virtually unusable.

The high-quality preview first does any rendering necessary then outputs the preview to your camcorder's LCD panel. On unadulterated video this worked fine, but title overlays and the more complex transitions caused very erratic playback. We managed to overcome this problem by disconnecting the camcorder when we'd finished capturing, forcing the preview onto the PC.

This was not only much easier to see, but a lot smoother. It was also easier to scrub the playhead through the storyboard.

To rearrange clips on the storyboard you drag them into position. The storyboard window can be replaced with a timeline if you prefer, but it's actually much easier to add transitions in storyboard mode. The library window to the right of the preview window contains a good selection of 2D and 3D transitions, most of which can be modified using the controls in the options panel.

While VideoStudio's audio clips are nothing to write home about, the title editor has some decent templates, good typographic controls and basic animation including rolling and crawling.

The Finish tab provides output options including recording back to DV tape and writing Mpeg-1, Mpeg-2, RealVideo and WMV streaming files to disc. There are also buttons for authoring VCD, SVCD and DVD discs which export the video in the appropriate format and launch Ulead's DVD wizard. This wizard-based DVD authoring application is even easier to use than Video Studio.

A main menu is created from all the clips in the project complete with navigation buttons. All you need to do is edit the captions, choose a template and preview the movie. The transcoding has been done so this is a quick process, depending on the length of your movie and drive speed.

And the image quality of the finished DVD was very good indeed.

System requirements:

• 450MHz Pentium III
• Windows 98SE/2000/Me/XP/64MB of Ram
• 500MB of free hard disk space
• graphics card capable of 800 x 600 resolution display

Ulead 01327 844880
www.ulead.com