Others say...

"Great for video editing, too bad no DVD authoring"
I wish this software work like it should!!!
The software is quite intuitive and I spent ~ 2 hours learning it and was able to consequently create two 1.5 hr long videos completed with open/close title sequences, scene transitions, voice, music tracks, video overlay and filtering. It's great for that purpose, although some of the preview feature is somewhat quirky, and it demands some quite odd restrictions during editing process like forcing the deletion of transitions between clips if the one of the clip is to be splitted into two sectoins, but all of the editing feature worked as advertised.
Now comes to time to bring the video onto the DVD, that where it all went down the tube. First DVD was created fairly eventlessly despite a very long video conversion sequence (I think it ran as long as the video's full run length) eventhough majority of the footage was already in DVD mpeg-2 format to start with. But the DVD created consistent skips and hicups in changing chapter,locking up the players, etc. I tried the DVD disk on several players as well on three computers with DVD-ROMs, all of them skipped on the playback and locks up when switching chapters on the disk. I have also tried 3 times to create a second disk with a bit more added effects and sound tracks the DVD disk creation process had consistently failed during video conversion step, even when I try to creat an ISO DVD image the software just could not finish converting the video and crashes every time with 99% converstion completed!!! EVERYTIME with 99% completion.
I like the video editing function of this software quite a lot, but without the ability to author the completed video onto a DVD disk, the software really is quite useless.
I have updated the software with the latest patches and have more than enough computer resources for the job, but the buggy DVD creation module is causing tremendous amout of frustration.
Updated audio synchronization problems:
If your video is longer than a couple of minutes, this software will definitely have trouble syncing the audio to the video sequence. I have tried this for many projects, unless you split a video into many, many, many projects, you will be faced with audio out of sync problems. It's so bad, after 30 minutes, the audio lag will be as much as 10-20 seconds. This is absolutely unacceptable. The software has decent editing features, but horrible audio sync.

"Great Video Editor"
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.

"Consistently froze on Windows98 SE Pentium III"
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.

"VideoStudio 8 may not work for you"
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.

"One of the best consumer video editor for the price!"
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!