Review by Raistlin

I’ve been making home videos for years (and I have years more to do still on hard drives!) I’m always looking for a better, easier, and faster way of making them work. I’ve used everything from Microsoft Movie Maker to Adobe products to Nero products. This product has several things going for it but some operational issues hold me back from wholeheartedly recommending it.

PROS:
Quick movies. This cranked out a completed movie (rendering and on disc) in about an hour on an older PC (4 GB RAM, AMD quad-core). That’s not bad at all.
Very simple UI. It’s easy to get up and running for anyone who has ever used any type of movie maker and clean enough that it would be easy for new users as well.
Output looks good. The DVD worked well after burn and played right on several machines.

CONS:
Adding items to Timeline is hard. Once you try to add something to the timeline it generally goes to the end of the timeline for that section. So when I tried to add a picture between two clips I kept having it go to the very end and had to drag it back to where I wanted it. It’s just not that intuitive or flexible. After making four or five movies I was able to figure this out, but there is a learning curve.
Lack of content for menus, themes, transitions. The themese that come with VS are basic and not easy to customize. I didn’t see an open source way of adding new ones either. Contrasted with Adobe Premier Elements (around the same cost) and this is a big detriment.

Overall, this makes quick movies but has a bunch of design elements that I just didn’t like. If they don’t matter to you then this is a good program. If you are like me, you may want a different one.