Ulead VideoStudio 8 - Home Movies

by Ulead

Product Features

• Easy-to-use home video editing software
• Over 700 effects, video frames, and graphics
• Compose thousands of soundtracks with auto music maker
• Capture from all camcorders; share on DVD, tape, and the Web
• Includes video tutorial, samples, and 180-page manual

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00020T5EK
• Item model number: A28-480-111-0A0000
• Date first available at Amazon.com: April 6, 2004
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #12,317 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Ulead VideoStudio 8 is home-video editing software that makes editing your movies as fun as shooting them. And, if you've never edited a movie before, make one in three easy steps using the new Movie Wizard mode. Share finished projects on DVD, tape, the Web, and mobile devices. Unmatched stability, high-speed rendering, and real-time performance mean less waiting and more time for creating.

Make editing your movies as fun as shooting them.

• Easy to learn and use: The Movie Wizard gives you great movies in minutes. A complete video tutorial, samples, and a 180-page manual will get you up and running in no time.
• More creative content: Get artistic with more than 700 effects, video frames, and graphics. Compose thousands of soundtracks with the auto music maker.
• The most complete: Capture from all camcorders. Edit with professional effects. Share on DVD, tape, and on the Web.

Product Description

ULEAD A28480111 SYSTEMS VIDEO-STUDIO 8 SOFTWARE - WIN

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great stability; easy to use; room for improvement, July 25, 2004

By 

Larry H in Austin (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ulead VideoStudio 8 - Home Movies (CD-ROM)

After a few failed attempts with other video-editing packages, I was pleasantly surprised with VS8. All I was looking for was some easy-to-use, **stable** software to convert unwatchable raw home videos into something more palatable on DVD. For this, the most important tool is cutting out the unwanted video sections; VS8 is good at this task, allowing you to quickly pick and delete sections of the raw footage. VS8 also provides a decent package of effects, filters, audio, and overlay capability; IMO, this is sufficient to keep the amateur video buff happy for years to come. However, the implementation of it's features are a bit quirky; Ulead could improve by embracing standard Window's editing semantics. The quick run-down:

Pros:
- Stability!! This is by far the most important question when shopping for a video editor and, at least for me, VS8 is perfect.
- Pretty good tutorial included.
- Quick, easy editing of raw video.
- Lots of fun, easy-to-add effects.
- Easy to add video overlays, text, narration, and music.
- Greatly exceeds the needs of the home video artist.
- Intelligent DVD burner; after rendering for an hour, but targeting the wrong drive, it didn't start over when I changed to the correct drive.

Cons:
- Missing basic cut and paste capability for clips.
- Instead of using standard Windows look and feel, the program takes over the whole screen and implements functions in it's own quirky way.

Bottom line: the pros overwhelm the cons.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Great for video editing, too bad no DVD authoring, February 18, 2005

By 

J. Chen "weez" (Cali, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ulead VideoStudio 8 - Home Movies (CD-ROM)

I wish this software work like it should!!!
The software is quite intuitive and I spent ~ 2 hours learning it and was able to consequently create two 1.5 hr long videos completed with open/close title sequences, scene transitions, voice, music tracks, video overlay and filtering. It's great for that purpose, although some of the preview feature is somewhat quirky, and it demands some quite odd restrictions during editing process like forcing the deletion of transitions between clips if the one of the clip is to be splitted into two sectoins, but all of the editing feature worked as advertised.
Now comes to time to bring the video onto the DVD, that where it all went down the tube. First DVD was created fairly eventlessly despite a very long video conversion sequence (I think it ran as long as the video's full run length) eventhough majority of the footage was already in DVD mpeg-2 format to start with. But the DVD created consistent skips and hicups in changing chapter,locking up the players, etc. I tried the DVD disk on several players as well on three computers with DVD-ROMs, all of them skipped on the playback and locks up when switching chapters on the disk. I have also tried 3 times to create a second disk with a bit more added effects and sound tracks the DVD disk creation process had consistently failed during video conversion step, even when I try to creat an ISO DVD image the software just could not finish converting the video and crashes every time with 99% converstion completed!!! EVERYTIME with 99% completion.
I like the video editing function of this software quite a lot, but without the ability to author the completed video onto a DVD disk, the software really is quite useless.
I have updated the software with the latest patches and have more than enough computer resources for the job, but the buggy DVD creation module is causing tremendous amout of frustration.
Updated audio synchronization problems:
If your video is longer than a couple of minutes, this software will definitely have trouble syncing the audio to the video sequence. I have tried this for many projects, unless you split a video into many, many, many projects, you will be faced with audio out of sync problems. It's so bad, after 30 minutes, the audio lag will be as much as 10-20 seconds. This is absolutely unacceptable. The software has decent editing features, but horrible audio sync.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good for Beginners, July 7, 2004

By 

K. Loden "southaven" (Tennessee) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ulead VideoStudio 8 - Home Movies (CD-ROM)

First off, this is a fairly easy program to learn and use, even if you are a beginner at video editing. Capture from DV works like a charm. The program includes a decent amount of effects and transitions as well as many other features. This program is the only one I know of (in it's price range) that will allow you to do video overlays (i.e. picture-in-picture effects.) So overall, a great program for beginners. However, you will soon outgrow this software if you are serious at all about video editing. Some of the quirks that are frustrating to me are the fact that when you do an overlay, if you add another file or media to the main video track, your overlays do not "stick" in the timeline and are moved. This means you should complete the main video track before adding any overlays, or you will need to correct their timings later. Another thing I wish this program would let you do is add transitions between overlay tracks, and allow more than one overlay at a time. Also, the DVD creation part of the program is very bare bones. The software has other quirks that bug me, but for the price, it does a good job.

After using this program for a couple of weeks, I am already looking to upgrade to more robust video editing software. If you just want to make DVD's of your DV footage, this is a good choice. It just has some limitations.