Review by mateo52

Filmmaking and video editing are not strengths of mine or applications I plan to spend a great deal of time with in the future, but I would not consider myself a neophyte either. I have authored DVDs with other software programs, created titles, added subtitle tracks to movies, combined sources from multiple input media. I have tried Roxio Creator 10, Windows Movie Maker and a range of freeware applications. My objective in this case was to capture, contrast and compare a specific group of scenes from three versions of the same film and burn the files to DVD with menuing and commentary. I tried to duplicate the same procedures in each of the software packages, starting with WMM and concluding with ULead. My impressions were ULead was not any more difficult to comprehend than the others but it did offer more flexibility and enhanced features that resulted in what I consider to be a superior end product. I cannot discount that practice' with the other packages may have rendered this software more intuitive however, I found the GUI as easy, or easier to understand and follow than WMM or Roxio, and I elected to use video editing in lieu of the wizard feature.<br /><br />While I only gave it a cursory overview, I happen to be a stickler in some areas like documentation so the inclusion of what I consider to be a thorough user manual - albeit in miniscule type size- rather than requiring the user to log on to a website and download huge PDF files is a big plus in my opinion. On the other side of the ledger however, I could not register the product as I received a pop-up error message informing me I had attempted to register alegacy version’ that is no longer supported.

I did have some installation issues, not with the process itself but rather with outcomes. Installation procedure automatically hijacks default status for copying/playing DVDs, all image display, and contributes to performance degradation by installing at least three start-up applications InterVideoDVD (and this is WinDVD8 while 9 is the current standard), CorelPhotoshop monitor and calls Quicktime, if it is already on your hard drive. It is not an uncommon practice among software creators, what is uncommon here is I do not recall seeing an option during the install to maintain my current default programs. This application seems precariously close to bloatware in my view. I have 4GB of memory, or 3Gb or relevant memory with Vista but when this application is open I cannot run any other background activities that require higher resource allocation like Outlook. One major sidenote, any program that starts off with the advisory you may want to double cache size is by definition a resource hog. While the system requirements indicate this software will work in a 512mb environment, I think anything under 1Gb is just asking for frustration.