Ulead is one of the leading names in home video editing, so any new iteration of its flagship VideoStudio is keenly awaited. Version 10 comes in two feature levels and the fully equipped Video Studio 10 Plus is reviewed here. It includes support for HD video, which is growing increasingly important as more HD camcorders and HD TV transmissions become available. Greater system resources are needed for HD work, but Ulead has mitigated against these using a proxy system, so you can work on-screen with lower definition files, before rendering in HD when edits are complete. The other system-wide improvements are support for Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound and full input and output support for MPEG-4, needed for creating videos on handheld devices or consoles.

The first thing you notice when running VideoStudio 10 Plus is the changed interface. The preview screen no longer hogs the centre of the display, but can be positioned to left or right, giving more room for controls and browsers. Ulead has taken the opportunity to clean up its look, too. Seven tabs along the top of the screen follow the logical progression of a video project, from Capture through Edit, Effect, Overlay, Title and Audio, to Share.

The program can capture from a wide variety of sources, including camcorders with USB connections and DVB-T. The DVB-T option is a welcome addition to the software because it increases the range of recordable TV channels from four or five to well over 30. The program can now perform a quick scan on a DV tape, too, cataloguing all the clips on it and producing a digest that can be printed out for reference.

VideoStudio 10 Plus includes two new features that make trimming video clips easier. The first is AccuCut, a strip of frame thumbnails in the Multi-Trim Editor, which you can shuttle through very accurately using an on-screen wheel. Combine that with a slider on the left, which zooms from a whole sequence down to half a dozen frames, and you can zero in on cuts quickly and accurately.

The second is Ad Zapper, a natural extension of automatic scene detection. It scans a piece of video recorded off TV and spots gaps, ideally those between programme content and adverts, stripping them out. If the recording has fairly clean-cut ad breaks, it works pretty well, but with sponsor headers and footers to programme segments, it can get confused. Also, if the programme itself has short, sharply cut scenes, it can mistake these for breaks. You can vary the sensitivity of the scan and it certainly saves time over cutting them all out manually.

Special effects
The new program supports six overlay tracks, which is a big improvement over the single one in version 9. It can make the storyboard or timeline crowded, but gives scope for montage and picture-in-picture effects. Talking of effects, there are extra sets of mask transitions, so you can switch from scene to scene with a sweep of leaves or snowflakes.

In the early days of home video editing, PCs were often too low powered to handle real-time rendering of things like scene transitions. What you saw on screen was a like a large thumbnail of your finished video, which was only rendered at the end of editing.VideoStudio 10 Plus uses a similar system, called Smart Proxy, to handle HD video on PCs of moderate means. It uses lower resolution ‘proxy’ files to display and edit, then incorporates the HD footage when you come to make your DVD. The whole system is transparent – it looks like you’re editing your HD video. It does increase final compile times, though.

The soundtrack can sometimes be the poor relation in a video, but Ulead has introduced Dolby 5.1 Creator, and provided a diagrammatic control for positioning sound left, right, back and forward within a 2D sound space. There are additional sliders for centre and sub-bass. You can still control channel volume envelopes in the timeline, to balance a music soundtrack with the video’s recorded soundtrack and any narration.

VideoStudio 10 Plus takes one of the best home video editors and improves on it in practical ways. It keeps up with new developments and plays catch up with professional-quality Dolby sound. For anybody wanting to create home or even semi-pro videos, it’s an excellent tool.