Corel Ulead VideoStudio 11.5 Plus [AMAZON.COM EXCLUSIVE]

Customer Rating:
Summary: wonderful program
Comment: I was very impressed with this program. It took me about 2 and half hours to open the program and end up with a finished product without even opening the manual. The animations and menus provided in the program are impressive and helped me make professional looking DVDs. The only problem I had was when the program came, the disk couldn't be found by my computer, I called Corel (After trying to find a phone number for support for 20 minutes) they were helpful and sent me a replacement disk that arrived in about a week. I would have been more than happy with the program if I had paid full price, but the Amazon.com exclusive price at $40 has me raving about not only the program, but amazon for supporting quality products.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Not fancy, but works
Comment: As a software developer, I like it when a product is easy to use and does what it is designed to do. This software does just that.

Out of the box, no reading the manual, I was able to clip videos, string them together and overlay a soundtrack. Pretty neat for the $$$. I have not played with the more 'advanced' functionality, as I have no wish to make production quality movies. ;-) I just wanted a way to take video clips and put them into a compilation video that worked. For this, the software works quite well. The output is usable on the computer, on cd's or dvd's, and can be transferred to others and it will work. You can't ask for much more on an inexpensive piece of software. For my purposes, it works very well.

Since I have not tried much of the program, I give it 4 stars instead of 5. For my purposes, it is a 5, but I cannot give it the highest rating without trying other parts of it.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Basic video editor -- cheap; stable; functional but missing key features
Comment: I'm using Ulead exclusively for AVCHD files 1920x1080 files shot with a Canon Vixia HF100. Ulead is installed on both a quadcore 2.6g HP Pavilion media center desktop and Dell XPS dualcore 2.4g laptop, both with 4mb ram, vista home premium, 7200 rpm hdds.

PROS:
- Cheap. $40! Holy cow.

- Absolutely stable. Unlike many other reviewers, I've had no system hangs, crashes or any other problem.

- Reads and works with AVCHD format with no problems. Importing files from the SD card into the Ulead library appears to take roughly the same amount of time as doing a copy-and-paste from the SD card.

- Smartrenders, so to create another mts or mpg file from the same format takes a fraction of the time.

CONS:

- Very poor documentation. If you buy this software, you better be prepared to learn by doing, and not rely on searching the Help files.

- Interface is not at all intuitive.

- Library management options are limited. When working with a whole bunch of shorter clips, I like to keep things organized within windows subfolders. But that doesn't automatically translate into the ulead library, so i end up having to manually move my clips around every time i render or capture a new clip. Very annoying and duplicative.

- Audio filters lacking. I was very disappointed with the inability to adjust the audio recorded with the video beyond volume levels. I have to save the audio as a separate sound file, then add it as an audio track in order to apply filters. Also, you can save audio as a separate sound file (Wav, MP4 etc) but not in the most popular MP3 format, so if recorded a concert you want to save as mp3, be prepared to use other software.

- Changing aspect ratio on a clip from 16:9 to 4:3 is mindbendingly complex. It's easy enough to crop a 16:9 file down to the right aspect ratio, but Ulead wants to either add a colored fill for the "cropped" portion or expand the remaining portion to fill a 16:9 screen. One would expect that just changing the Project Properties to 4:3 would fix this, but NO, if the original clip was 16:9, ulead appears to completely ignore the Project Properties setting. The only method I've found to get ulead to change a clip's aspect ratio is to first "crop" the sides, then use the cumbersome "Distort" option to manually drag the handles of the resized clip to get rid of the colored bars at the sides. Rather than go thru that brain damage, i've found it simpler just to export the finished 16:9 video into Avi format, and then use freeware VirtualDub to do the cropping to 4:3. There should be a one-click automatic option to crop and resize a clip from one aspect ratio down to another.

I've only worked with 20 minute videos, so I can't speak to longer recordings. I haven't had need to use the smartproxy setting, which is supposed to speed up the process of working with high def files (my computers are powerful, but are definitely not cutting-edge). After editing, I usually render files into either a high res mpg or std def XVID compressed AVI. Rendering time on the desktop is, as expected, much faster compared to the laptop, so it does appear as though the software takes advantage of the quad core.

Also note, the bundled WinDVD Silver is useless for playing AVCHD files, and must be upgraded to handle AVCHD files.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Ulead VideoStudio 11.5 Plus
Comment: Corel Ulead VideoStudio 11.5 Plus is the video editing and DVD authoring software that made my creativity really excel... I learned fast how to use the timeline editing! The import of the avi files from my video camera was done fast and the MPEG video optimizer saved me many hours of encoding. The wizard assisted me from the beginning to the end; it even burned my DVD so I did not need to buy a burning software. I used my video camera to tape the Beatles Brothers show in Lincolnshire and they allowed me to sing with them John Lennon's part from "If I Fell" and the next month Eric Howell allowed me to play with him the Beatles "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party", "I'll Be Back", "Baby's in Black" and "If I Fell"...hey it is a Beatle in all of us, and my DVD looks so fantastic with that professional menus, great sound and superb video quality...mmmm. Good job Corel, thank you for making me happy. Octavian

Customer Rating:
Summary: VERY easy to use!
Comment: I found this software very easy to use. I had been using Windows MovieMaker but found I had constant problems with saving file. Uline was VERY easy -- very intuitive and with lots of features I hadn't even thought of (like changing the file format and file sharing to YouTube etc). I uploaded files from a Kodak Easyshare without any problem. It took almost no looking through the instructions to get it up and running and a video saved and sent off. If you are a total newbie or experienced at video making, I think you'll find Uline a valuable tool.