Mastered Windows Movie Maker? Then you'll love this

Ulead, now owned by image-editing behemoth Corel, has enjoyed a fair degree of success with its series of VideoStudio editing programs.

The straightforward yet flexible suite has always been a great place to graduate to after exhausting Windows Media Player's ability to juggle holiday clips, and more recent iterations have placed some remarkably sophisticated effects in the hands of rank amateurs.

Adding nifty overlay and chromakey (blue/green screen) effects - to hide the fact you were holidaying in Dorset, not the Bahamas - has never been easier.

If anything, updates in this latest version are oriented towards making the editing process even more straightforward and less time-consuming. The addition of a host of new movie wizard templates is also welcome, although we'd have preferred a few more than the 21 short clips that come preinstalled.

More relevant is the MPEG optimiser, which ensures you won't be sitting around twiddling your thumbs after you've finally put all your video and audio clips into some kind of order.

It checks through the various clips and ensures that there's no needless processor crunching going on during the encoding of the final file - only files that require a transcode receive one.

Also welcome for casual users, who aren't generally keen on waiting for their PC to finish churning out a huge file, is the option to safely pause the encoding process so you can use other applications. Unfortunately, if you're encoding to WMV the optimiser isn't hugely helpful, but for most DVD-related tasks it's a real boon.

VideoStudio 11 Plus goes some way to cleaning up the inadequacies of the person behind the camera as well, with an endlessly useful white balance tool which, if the automatic setting can't help, enables you to select the area that's supposed to be white and shift the colours to compensate.

Good by definition

If you've splurged lots of money on an AVCHD High Def camera, this program provides excellent support for high-definition cameras and HD-DVD writers. Considering the size of the files involved, the proxy editing engine handles cutting HD video with aplomb. Of course, with the camcorders themselves costing the GNP of a small country, you may find this isn't high on your list of priorities.

If you're not prepared to part with the cash required for the Plus version of VideoStudio 11 because of your more modest editing needs, then it's worth considering the standard edition. You lose some neat features, including surround sound, HD and h.264 MP4 support, and some overlay effects, but the core of the program and its efficiency for editing remain.

Our main problem with VideoStudio 11 Plus is that while all the new additions are worthwhile and appreciated, it's hardly a quantum leap over the previous version. If you've already bought last year's VideoStudio 10 Plus, only the MPEG optimiser will immediately leap out as a genuinely new feature.

Having said that, it's another very strong release and set aside from its admittedly recent predecessor, VideoStudio 11 Plus is both a powerful and a user-friendly way to add some spice to your home videos.

Score

• 4 / 5

For

• Performs very well indeed
• Simple to use

Against

• Not a huge step up from the previous version

Verdict

Specification