Sick and tired of your home movies looking icky and unprofessional? Well, you are not alone…and your prayers have just been answered with Corel's Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus. The new software provides all of the tools that you desire in order to produce a really nice looking home film. The instructions given are step-by-step when first starting out, which makes the product easy to use and enjoyable at the same time. The software claims that within only three steps, you will have a professional looking video. We tried it out, and agree— it's simple and the finished film looks fantastic. The Movie Wizard option is great for new users, because it lays all of your clips out in a logical sequence. There are themes that make the opening portion of the film look professional and it even has a Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound feature that will allow your movies to sound impressive! You can create a regular DVD, HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc, and have DeBlock and DeSnow Filters that can clean up your footage from outside noise or distractions. The feature on this product which makes it the easiest to use for new film editors is the ability to place cue marks on a timeline to mark where certain clips should start, or even where you want to start some music to accompany the footage. The ability to do this a must, as any film creator knows how easy it is to lose your place (and mind) in the midst of creating a masterpiece. Another exceptional thing about Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus is that it supports multi-language titles, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean among others. In a world that continues to get smaller with the use of the Internet, this is a great function to have. A world-class leader, Corel again is a step above the rest.

This new editing software is a welcome solution for producing a really fresh looking film. VideoStudio 11 Plus offers support for taking your two channel audio and converting it via a click of a button to Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound. Once you do, you can use the Surround Sound mixer to tweak the settings to the video track, overlay track, voice track, and music track. VideoStudio already has a fairly comprehensive collection of filters and effects. Version 11 Plus adds Auto Color and Tone filters as well as DeBlock and DeSnow filters, for tweaking videos that have too much pixelation or too much noise. Another new feature is the MPEG optimizer. Designed to save time (and CPU cycles) the MPEG Optimizer will analyze the video file bitrates on the Timeline and make a recommendation on what portion of the Timeline should be re-encoded. In the sample below, the suggested re-encoded segment is red in color, saving 77.81 percent of your time. So rather than re-encode all the clips on the Timeline, VideoStudio 11 Plus will only re-encode that which it sees as necessary.

Corel's Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus also features a full complement of video file formats that the software can output to. In addition to the old familiar standbys such as DV, DVD, SVCD, and of course Windows Media Video... new file output format support also includes the latest MPEG-4 variants, such as those made for iPod, PSP, Zune, PDA, and mobile phones, as well as HDV (1080i and 720p for both HDV and PC playback), HD DVD (NTSC 1920 and 1440) and Blu-ray Disc complete with motion menus. When you Create a Disc, in addition to the video file you've just created, you can also import video clips from other sources, such as from a mobile device, camcorder or a DVD disc including AVCHD, TOD and M2TS files. Create Disc enables you to add a simple menu for your project files, add text and a title to the menu. Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus has a new feature that enables you to burn your projects to HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc, so if have an HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc burner, you can burn to that new format as well as traditional DVD formats. VideoStudio 11 Plus also uploads directly to YouTube to easily share your videos with family and friends without creating a disc. For these and many more reasons, we immediately gave Corel's Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus one of our Editor's Choice Awards!  UB