After going through the initial learning curve, I found when capturing video from my camcorder, some of the scenes were jumpy and the audio was missing, I partially overcame this by either recapturing the scene or I cut out the bad parts. The programme also crashed on a number of occasions causing me to lose time and the immediately unsaved work. I put up with this as I thought I could work round it, however when it came to burning a disc the operation failed miserably, the disc I was using then became unusable and had to be destroyed, I spent many hours experimenting with various different ways of burning a disc and with different capturing properties, I read the manual from cover to cover, I followed the recommended procedures by J.C.Hunter, I scoured all the bulletins for information that might overcome the problem but to no avail, I must have gone through about 30 disc before I gave up. In desperation I transferred the edited material back onto my camera in AVI format and recorded it to disc through a video recorder, this worked perfectly but without the benefit of the menu templates that are available on VideoStudio.I hate being beaten and in desperation I contacted support on two separate occasions by e-mail explaining the problem, I received an acknowledgement offering me a 5% discount on software that I didn't want and saying they would look into the problem. So far I have heard nothing more. I continued trying various ways to burn a disc and finally had some success by using a DVD-RW disc and selecting either DVD-Video (fast re-editable) or DVD+VR recording format. The system will not allow the use of a DVD-R disc in either of these modes.
Recently I have tried out two other products, the first is Pinnacle and I found this worked well, if somewhat differently to Ulead, but was much smoother in operation and the disc burning was more reliable and much quicker than Ulead. The only problem I found was I could not read or edit any previously downloaded AVI files, the only way was to download again from the camcorder - more work!
I finally tried Adobe Premier Element v3, HEAVEN, this works like a dream. It a bit more expensive but it really is worth the extra and I know that I will recoup and extra cost by saving on spoilt discs. The disc creating process is super quick and the software is a delight to use with lots of lovely features, I can also use any existing files that I downloaded from Ulead.
A trial version is available on the Adobe website but I would recommend reading the hardware requirements first. Apparently it will not run on anything less then a pentium 4 processor.
Please let me know if this has been useful to anyone.
I hope Ulead read this and maybe it will encourage them to get their act together. I would ask for my money back if I thought they would listen.
