Video editing can make or break those home movies of your latest adventure or that important business presentation. Until recently you only had the choice of some expensive professional, or some fairly crude software packages, but over recent years Ulead has put video editing within the reach of most video camera users, and at a reasonable price.

This package makes it so easy for even a novice to produce professional looking presentations using an ordinary PC, the main limitation these days being the access speed of the hard drive. VideoStudio 6 is a very versatile package, perhaps not up to the standard of Adobe Premiere as used by many professionals, but it has all the home videographer needs to produce quality and interesting productions.

Operation is intuitive and easy, and certainly better than version 5, (see [I]PC Authority, May 2001, page 93[/I]). It is basically a matter of working your way across the menu bar at the top of the main screen from opening a New Project through to Capture, Editing and Rendering.

When working with Digital cameras VideoStudio makes full use of the ability to sense scene changes and separate out downloaded video into clips ready for adjusting and editing. It senses date and time of the recording.

Batch recording of clips is also easy: you simply watch the incoming video and mark In and Out at the appropriate points and then save it with one click, minimising disk usage.

While VideoStudio is geared towards working with and controlling digital cameras, it will still work quite satisfactorily with analog sources providing you have an analog to digital capture card in the system, or an external unit like the Canopus ADVC100 (see [I] PC Authority, June 2002, page 45[/I]) to provide digital input to the program.

VideoStudio can work in either MPEG 1 for more conventional projects or MPEG 2 for burning DVDs, and one new feature of this version is the ability to capture DVD-ready MPEG video, straight from an IEEE 1394 connection. It also has the ability to recognise differing properties of clips and adjust the work to suit these variations automatically.

When editing, a novel feature that other packages could look seriously at is the ability to expand the storyboard to full screen, making it much easier to see what you are doing. Apart from the video track, you are provided with an overlay track and two sound tracks -- one for voice over and the other for music. Provision is also made to capture still images via USB for insertion in the finished production.

If you have recorded live sound with the video, then this shows up as an extra track, so there is versatility when working in this mode. Editing uses the SMPTE system allowing very accurate trimming of clips down to frame accuracy.

Provision is made for animated titles that can even include vertical text. There is also a wide range of customisable transitions provided to give polish to the project.

It is possible to preview the finished product in real time at full resolution and, another new feature called Smart Render, avoids the necessity to completely re-render the project if small editing modifications are made to it. It just renders the mods and slots them in.

The previous limitation of a video file size of 4GB has been overcome by sensing the size and splitting the output into separate contiguous files ready for downloading to VCR. Output can be either AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, Windows Media, Real Video and QuickTime, and can used for burning CDs, DVDs or output to tape, email or Internet streaming.

This is really a great package for those who want to edit their home movies or even produce a slick presentation for an important project.