VideoStudio 8 review

VideoStudio has never been - and probably never will be - the most elegant of video-editing packages, but Ulead has a remarkable habit of piling copious numbers of exciting new features into each new release.

Once again, VideoStudio is better than ever. However, some old problems remain unsolved, and this time Ulead has created some new ones too.

Our favourite of the new features is Pan & Zoom, which lets you define a path to pan across a photo to create classy-looking slideshows. You set start, end and mid-positions, and the software smoothly scans between them across the picture. Add some music and render the results to DVD-Video, and you'll be wowing friends and family with even the dullest of photo collections. Sadly, though, you can't do the same thing for video, something that Screenblast Movie Studio has supported for years.

Another welcome update is the text overlay, which now lets you combine a variety of fonts, colours and snazzy animations onscreen at the same time. The results look more stylish than in previous versions, but there's no way to adjust the timing of each animation preset, so many presets don't sit happily on the same screen.

The ability to split audio from a video track is another new feature that doesn't quite deliver on its promise. This allows you to edit video clips and their soundtracks independently, but VideoStudio's insistence on automatically closing any gaps in the timeline means it had a habit of sabotaging the more creative edits we tried to achieve.

VideoStudio's audio capabilities have seen some significant improvements. There's a new Audio View, with volume envelopes for each of the four audio tracks at your disposal. A volume meter helps you avoid distorting the audio by turning it up too much, and you can even generate volume changes simply by recording fader adjustments. This is certainly easier than drawing envelopes directly, which is far fiddlier than it should be.

New audio effects include Normalise to bring all audio elements up to a standardised volume, but Remove Noise simply cuts out quiet sections of the soundtrack and rarely succeeds in doing what it claims. Bizarrely, the audio effect controls aren't accessible when in Audio View mode.

There are plenty of welcome new features. You can import video directly from non-encrypted DVDs, batch-convert files into different video formats and add music that fits your movie perfectly from a library of cheesy but fun templates. MPEG4 support is available as an option for £14 including VAT, while Dolby Digital (stereo only) and 3GPP (for mobile phones) plug-ins are also available at the same price. There's even a book on film-making techniques included in the box.

While many of the new features leave room for improvement, the most serious problems with VideoStudio aren't new ones. Once again, video effects are hidden away in a drop-down menu rather than being accessed via the Effects button at the top. The software does a decent job of previewing even fairly complex effects in real time, but even on a fast PC there's a delay of around five seconds between pressing play and the video appearing on screen. VideoStudio's competitors show that there's no need for this. Like many of its competitors, it isn't particularly stable, crashing at least once a day in our tests. This is a common problem among low-cost video-editing packages, possibly because video editing is one of the most demanding tasks you could set a PC, but Screenblast Movie Studio is more reliable.