Ulead Videostudio 7

I am back to Ulead Vis. Studio after having tried Pinnacle version 8 I got Ulead VS Version 5 free with a Firewire board and was getting tired of its limitations so when Pinnacle version 8 came out with great reviews I bought it and was disappointed. So I bought Ulead VisualStudio version 7. Pinnacle 8 wouldnt read some of my AVI or MPEG files (Windows Media Player, Realplayer, and Quicktime would) but would read others. I guess you have to load it with Pinnacle for it to read the AVIs and MPEGs. Video editing takes a lot of CPU power with either editor and my new AMD Athlon 2400 is about adequate - any less and I wouldnt try it. With VS version 7 I was able to make some VCDs (320x240 resolution), Super VCDs (640x480 resolution), and WMVs (higher compression than MPEG), and played them on my DVD player and emailed them to friends with good results. For example, in the Pinnacle product, you have a single brightness control but in VS 7 you have to apply a filter with confusing controls - the default is to start bright and end the clip on the brightest setting. Most of the time, you want the whole clip brighter but when you fool around with the controls you realize the VS filter allows you to set the brightness at any setting at any point in the clip so it can start at one setting, smoothly go to a higher setting 3 seconds into the clip and then smoothly back to a lower setting. There seem to be no real limits on the number of different points you can set in a clip. This works with all the transition settings of which there are a fair few. The many transitions available between clips are also quite nice, and reasonably flexible, though I think crossfade is the simplest and best - otherwise you distract the viewer with special effects instead of the video you are trying to show. When you load from your camcorder the software will automatically split it into scenes and load a transition (your choice or randomly selected). This is very handy. Some differences make you feel you need both software to get the best results. For slow or speeded up motion, Ulead lets you choose any %-age increase or decrease while Pinnacle limits you to specific settings, but Pinnacle allows you to opt for not smoothly interpolatig frames whch gives you a very nice effect for some sports actions. There are some other improvements I can think of but if you fool around with this you will find you can do most things pretty easily. Each filter degrades the video quality so you need to be careful with what you do. VS does some things very well, but in other cases the techniques take some getting used to. I cant afford to buy every video movie maker but Pinnacle 8 got the best reveiws in the magazines and I think Ulead VS 7 is better - for under $500 software.