Others say...

"Seems to be the best bang for the buck"
After looking at the reviews for the video editing software, I settled on the Ulead VideoStudio 10 Plus. The Adobe Premiere 3.0 also had some excellent reviews but would not work on my computer. I have a AMD socket A with 1 gig of ram. Sempron 2600 cpu does not support the SSE2 required for the Adobe. The Pinnacle suite had some good reviews, but I have had a lot of buggy issues with Pinnacle in the past and other users said that Pinnacle still has isues.

I have made three DVD's so far. One with the trial and two with the bought version. All three came out well. The more I learn, the better and faster I become. The first DVD had a hard time in burning the disc. I turned the burn speed down to 2X and have not had an issue. Even made multiple copies which burned a LOT faster after the original rendering was done. The rendering does seem to take a couple to several hours. Depends on the length of the production. The Ulead is supposed to be one of the faster ones out there too. Then again, my system is not very advanced. I noticed that during the rendering process, that the cpu is being worked at 100%. I tried to use the computer during the rendering and had it freeze, so make sure that you save your project during the creation. Basically, when rendering to burn the DVD, do it when sleeping, or when doing something else. The last two burns went without a hitch.

I didn't really read any of the instructions and found the format for making the movie pretty nice. I have not done anything outside of adding some music, transitions, wording and trimming the clips. The easy ability of adding titles during the production (explaining the scene, adding some silly comments) was very nice, I am sure that the other brands will do the same thing.

When making the movie, I added the titles or wording as I went then added the transitions. By adding the transitions after the wording, the transitions would shift the various clips leaving the wording at the wrong places. Took about an hour to sync the titles and wordings back up (I had a lot of them).

Overall, for the $100 I find it a wonderful program. I can take our home movies that while exciting to us, must be boring to others, and trim the unneccessary stuff out, spice it up with words, music and transitions and basically make a fun movie. Adding the pictures from the trip at the end and setting it to music is great to. I found having the volume for the music with the pictures set at 50% was good. The first movie, I had the volume at 100% and it was way to loud.

This program may have some issues and may not be THE best, but for my needs and my system, I like it a lot. Another thing, I found that defragging the hard drive was a help before doing the project. If you do a lot of stuff to the movie like I did, The computer seemed to bog down and when I tried to burn, the program would not do very well. I saved the work that I did, restarted the computer and then went to the burning process. For me, this worked great.

"4 stars BUT.........."
....I cross my fingers when the time comes to burn the disk. Be prepared for multiple attempts at burning a good disk, and be prepared to waste 2 hours per. Once you get the good disk, use another DVD copy program like Sonic to make other copies.

"NOT ready for Prime Time"
We purchased this program because of it's glitzy features. But be forewarned: this editing software is SLOW...SLOW...SLOW at rendering.

And there are BUGS in the program. It locks up at various stages, and has turned out to be a NIGHTMARE at the chaptering/disc burning stage.

Ulead's former program, Workshop 2, is much more stable, but it doesn't burn WIDESCREEN menus. Why can't this company get things right?

VideoStudio 10 Plus has some nice features, but you'll pay a PRICE (FRUSTRATION) if you try to use the software. You've been warned. We do NOT recommend it. Check around in forums for software others highly recommend.

"Great for making coasters, awful for making DVDs"
This product is anything but intuitive. I still can't figure out how to make it work in its most basic form having created 3 vaguely decent DVDs and a dozen coasters.
Its ability to scan your video camera and split the tape into clips is excellent. Its ability to let you drag those clips onto a story board is excellent. Clipping bits off the front and back of clips is a breeze. Adding titles to your clips is pretty easy.
Creating chapters and menus is a nightmare. It either uses your entire movie as the title (complete with elevator music) or it misses out a great chunk of your soundtrack so that your visit to Disneyland contains your commentary for your sister's wedding. I haven't even dared to try the flashy features that this product boasts as even the basic ones won't work.
Buy something - anything - else.

"Nice but there are issues .. .read on"
I purchased Ulead VideoStudio 10 Plus as I had good experiences with the previous version. It creates mpeg-4 video for iPods and otehr portable media quite easily. I came across one important issue ... I imported a home movie from a DVD the ntried to do another one immediately after, but could not. The "IMPORT" button in the dialog was no longer available. After several attempts I rebooted and was able to import the next movie. On caontacting Ulead's tech support I was told that I had to reboot after each movie import as "the memory was not being freed up for use." I asked if they were working on a solution and was told they had no solution. Besides this BIG issue its a nice product for creating your videos from pictures, existing video etc. This issue earned it 3 stars instead of 5.