Rating: 
Summary: Great stability; easy to use; room for improvement
Review: After a few failed attempts with other video-editing packages, I was pleasantly surprised with VS8. All I was looking for was some easy-to-use, **stable** software to convert unwatchable raw home videos into something more palatable on DVD. For this, the most important tool is cutting out the unwanted video sections; VS8 is good at this task, allowing you to quickly pick and delete sections of the raw footage. VS8 also provides a decent package of effects, filters, audio, and overlay capability; IMO, this is sufficient to keep the amateur video buff happy for years to come. However, the implementation of it's features are a bit quirky; Ulead could improve by embracing standard Window's editing semantics. The quick run-down:
Pros:
- Stability!! This is by far the most important question when shopping for a video editor and, at least for me, VS8 is perfect.
- Pretty good tutorial included.
- Quick, easy editing of raw video.
- Lots of fun, easy-to-add effects.
- Easy to add video overlays, text, narration, and music.
- Greatly exceeds the needs of the home video artist.
- Intelligent DVD burner; after rendering for an hour, but targeting the wrong drive, it didn't start over when I changed to the correct drive.
Cons:
- Missing basic cut and paste capability for clips.
- Instead of using standard Windows look and feel, the program takes over the whole screen and implements functions in it's own quirky way.
Bottom line: the pros overwhelm the cons.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for Beginners
Review: First off, this is a fairly easy program to learn and use, even if you are a beginner at video editing. Capture from DV works like a charm. The program includes a decent amount of effects and transitions as well as many other features. This program is the only one I know of (in it's price range) that will allow you to do video overlays (i.e. picture-in-picture effects.) So overall, a great program for beginners. However, you will soon outgrow this software if you are serious at all about video editing. Some of the quirks that are frustrating to me are the fact that when you do an overlay, if you add another file or media to the main video track, your overlays do not "stick" in the timeline and are moved. This means you should complete the main video track before adding any overlays, or you will need to correct their timings later. Another thing I wish this program would let you do is add transitions between overlay tracks, and allow more than one overlay at a time. Also, the DVD creation part of the program is very bare bones. The software has other quirks that bug me, but for the price, it does a good job.After using this program for a couple of weeks, I am already looking to upgrade to more robust video editing software. If you just want to make DVD's of your DV footage, this is a good choice. It just has some limitations.
Rating: 
Summary: Best consumer video editor for the price!
Review: I am very satisfied with VS8. I have tried many other video editors like My DVD, Roxio videowave, etc... This has many features that are not available or very limited in other editors in this price range. First and foremost, very stable.
Others have listed problems of burn errors, crashes, etc. I would suggest to make sure you install all of Ulead's VS8 updates and patches. Also DMA (direct memory access) must be enabled for your hard drive to avoid dropping frames. I also recommend enabling DMA for your DVD-RW drive also. What may also help to avoid burn errors is to disable Write-behind caching on the hard drive used for video capture. I am running Win XP sp2 with no problems. DVD media does make a difference. Check and use media compatible for your DVD-RW drive only.
VS8 is able to mix still pics with video that others cannot do with the exception of Windows movie maker. But that's where it ends. VS8 captures and burns to DVD. Video capture quality is the best I have seen besides My Sonic DVD. All editing tools and features are intuitive for me but reading (skimming) through the 180 pg. manual made my learning curve a lot easier. I like the overlay feature, I am able to add pic in pic, text effects with over 700 video and graphic effects. I especially like the time line depicting the separate audio line. I can tweak the audio with the rubber band option, to lower or raise the background music track, narration, or video track at any time interval. Easy to use video trim tools. DVD authoring OK, no motion menus like My Sonic DVD. But rendering is faster than other softwares.
I have just created a DVD video for our Church depicting the past year events. The response is an overwhelming success! They thought it was professionally done!
Rating: 
Summary: VideoStudio 8 may not work for you
Review: I found VideoStudio 8 worked pretty well for editing movies, but it failed miserably when burning DVDs, and was not without problems in loading video from a digital camcorder. Apparently it can make DVDs, but not good ones, or not on my computer (which is a new one designed for audio/video). Apparently a lot of people have a wide variety of problems at this stage, and none of the suggested fixes on the ULEAD forum worked for me. Technical support suggested upgdating Windows, reinstalling software, downloading patches, etc, but none of this could get the jitter out off the resulting DVDs. I would guess there is a good chance VideoStudio may work for you, but then again you may be stuck with software that only does 90% of what you need.
Rating:
Summary: save your money. get nero 6
Review: I had such a hard time with this program. The price is more attractive than Nero 6 but ease of use is worth the 20 or so dollars difference. The interaction of the Ulead software is not intuitive at all, the DVD encoding is unreliable and takes too long.
Rating:
Summary: Great Video Editor
Review: I have tried a couple editors ( like Sony Screenblast 3 ) and have found Ulead to be the best, easiest, and puts out very nice DVDs. I would advice anyone that is to buy this to get the updates ( as with anything, always update it to the latest ). The software is very stable and has a lot of powerfull tools. I have yet to have it lock-up or crash on me. Give Ulead VideoStudio 8 a try, you'll be glad you did.
Rating:
Summary: Crashed, bugged, and no support
Review: I've been a VideoStudio user since one of its earliest versions, and it has gotten worse as most technology got better. With version 6, I noticed an options button bug (Click it, and crash). Wrote Ulead for help... none. Thought version 7 would fix things. Same crash, same help. A glutton for punishment, I just purchased ver. 8 last month. Same crash, and same help. With version 6, 7, & 8 a click on any menu and the menu would pop out in 5 to 10 seconds. I remember that speed with my Commodore 64. Even pop-up descriptions either never surface (except for their frame), or also take 5 to 10 seconds to pop-up. Now with version 8, even starting the program takes a minute. That lady with the too big smile just stares at me for 30 seconds. My friends say, Hey dummy, maybe it's your hardware. Well, I'm on my third computer upgrade with every other program moving along with the faster processing speeds and newer technology. All except Ulead's VideoStudio. Look elsewhere for a video editor.
Rating:
Summary: Best Editing Program I've used
Review: I've used Roxio's Videowave and Pinnacle's Editing program and neither can compare with the ease of Ulead Videostudio 8. I'm sure I could get a better system for more money, but for less than $100, I love the ease of creating the timeline and adding and editing audio. I did have the system crash on me once, but since I had saved not long before didn't lose much, and crashing once, in about 300 hours of editing time, isn't bad. I wish the title feature had more options, but other than that I think it's great.
Rating:
Summary: Consistently froze on Windows98 SE Pentium III
Review: Most video editors require Windows XP, so I was interested in Video Studio 8, which is advertised as running on Windows98 SE. That is what I have on my VECTRA VL400 MT machine (933 MHz Pentium III). Alas, VideoStudio 8 crashed the first time it ran, and consistently froze when I tried to play any video clip.
Technical support was responsive via e-mail, but was not able to fix the problem. Reinstallation attempts did not help either. Going well beyond the call of duty, I reconfigured the hardware and restored all the machine's software to its original pristine "as delivered" state, and VideoStudio 8 still crashed and froze as before.
My recommendation is that for any video editing software, first download a trial version and see if it is compatible with your system. E.g., Pinnacle's Video Studio 9 Plus trial version seems to work fine on my system.
I returned VideoStudio 8 to Amazon, whose simple return procedure impressed me enough that I've already ordered Pinnacle's product from Amazon.
Rating:
Summary: Has Promise
Review: Overall I like Video Studio 8.0. It seems relatively stable and has some stunning visual and audio effects. It has two shortcomings that I see: 1) It does not allow you to save your overall DVD project (i.e. Chapters, backgrounds, music, etc.) and 2) Not the most responsive technical support. They never even wrote back when I asked them to address that issue. Otherwise it seems much more sophisticated than MyDVD 5.0, and more stable as well.
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