Description:
With more and more folks diving into the joys and challenges of digital video editing at home, VideoStudio 5 offers the aspiring videographer the latest in digital video technologies in an easy to utilize package. Presenting itself as movie-making software for everyone, VideoStudio is designed to reduce the learning curve while improving upon the previous version's capability to create fairly sophisticated videos and output them in a variety of useful formats. VideoStudio 5 comes with two CDs--the program itself, and a content CD of source material. In addition to VideoStudio, the program CD will also install QuickTime, Windows Media Format, RealPlayer, and Acrobat Reader. VideoStudio 5 supports the IEEE 1394, or FireWire, video capture card; but, if you have Windows NT, FireWire cards are not supported. You can use one of a number of other capture cards if this is the case. If you have a FireWire card and a DV camcorder, this means smooth plug-and-play operation. Just connect your DV camera and, with a couple of mouse clicks, you're controlling playback of your camera, capturing video directly to your hard drive. In fact, several new enhancements of VideoStudio 5 improve upon the video capture capabilities. For example, there is now automatic plug-and-play capture device detection. VideoStudio will recognize most DV cameras when plugged in, and select the appropriate capture plug-in, eliminating the need to restart the application and manually select the plug-in. There is now support for batch video capture, an extremely useful tool for capturing multiple sections of the same tape in one pass. Just set the mark in and out points of all the scenes you wish to capture, run batch capture, and go make coffee or change Junior's diapers while the footage is imported. New scene change detection will recognize date and time changes of an AVI-formatted DV video file, and break it into multiple clips, as in many cases these breaks indicate a content or scene change. This speeds up the organization of your source footage. Other new features include video filters, such as emboss, mosaic, and oil paint, that can be applied to clips directly. Titling has also improved, allowing for basic or 3-D-style text with transparency, edges, and shadows. An important enhancement in light of the popularity of video streaming over the Internet is support for the latest video streaming protocols like RealVideo and Windows Media files. You can also edit in MPEG-2 format, for DVD-quality video, and export to QuickTime, AVI, and other file formats. VideoStudio 5 continues to improve on Ulead's elegant, if slightly overdesigned, application. The goal is clearly to present a user interface that is as fun to look at as it is easy to use and create with. Ultimately, the latter is what really matters, and to this end VideoStudio succeeds. --John Bosch
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