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Ulead MediaStudio Pro 7
More real time effects, clever enhancements
by Charlie White
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 There's an updated Ulead MediaStudio Pro now available, and the improvements inside this new Version 7 make it an even better nonlinear editing software package than its predecessors. Innovative features and even more real time effects, along with some unique tricks, make Ulead MediaStudio Pro 7 ($495, $249 upgrade) an application that you'll want to examine for yourself. Digital Media Net's Charlie White took a look at it, and here's his review.
As it has been in the past, MediaStudio Pro 7 is actually like a big layer cake with five different applications folded into it: Video editing, audio editing, a vector-based character generator called CG Infinity, Video Paint (a paint-rotoscoping tool) and then a limited (but useful) DVD authoring applet as icing on top. It's not really like a cake, but more like a studio with five applications in one. Hey, now I get it -- that's why they call it MediaStudio Pro.
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 | | (Click Image for enlargement) MSP7's versatile capture routine lets you log at high speed and then select the shots you like for capture, or capture them all in one pass. |
One of my favorite new features of MSP7 is its enhanced capture routine. You get to this not by clicking on the File menu as you would on other nonlinear editing programs. With MSP, it's a separate application, a characteristic I found odd but got used to after a while. It's no big deal, because on the upper right of the screen there's a little word "switch" that'll get you to any other part of MediaStudio Pro, or any other Ulead application you have installed. That said, I really like the new features in its logging and capturing module -- the fastest and best way to get footage from DV tape onto a hard disk I've seen yet. Ulead calls it creating a "DV album," a feature that allows your DV capture source to be fast forwarded up to 10x speed, and then every scene break creates a log entry. You can either have it capture each scene then and there, or if you don't want to capture a bunch of shots you'll never need, it marks the In and Out of each scene for you, and then you can go back and choose which scenes you'll actually be using. When you mark the shots you like, MSP goes back and captures only them. After that, that log can be saved as a reference file. Another neat trick was its "scene detection by content" feature, which works post-capture, splitting your clips up into separate shots. I was able to fool it a bit more than I'd like, but it was still useful in high-contrast scenes. Overall, Ulead has created a great way to capture DV footage, where any type of capture scenario you can think of in DV or analog is accommodated. The software also works with any RGB or YUV analog card. It's also nice to be able to do a real time transcode directly to MPEG 1 or MPEG2. And as an added bonus, it's able to do what many thought impossible a few short years ago -- native MPEG editing. And, it can edit on any frame, not just the I-frames. I think this enhanced capture and encoding capability of MSP7 is almost worth the price of admission alone.
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