Digital Home Thoughts: Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus

Output
The video portion of the project is now complete. VideoStudio gives you a bunch of output options. One of whch is to open your project into the full VideoStudio editor for further editing. You can also export the video in formats optimized for iPod, Zune, PSP, PDAs, and mobile phones. A nice option here would probably be for them to add a YouTube optimized output format and perhaps a direct upload option. The other option is to create a DVD and that's the option we will explore here.


Figure 5: You have many output options.

Making the DVD
Now it's time to actually create your DVD. The first step is to create your chapters to allow the watcher to navigate your creation. If you imported multiple video clips, you can have VideoStudio automatically create chapters based on the clips. Then, you can create the menu system for your DVD. Again, VideoStudio provides almost 50 premade templates. Like the credits, you have the option to include actual video in the menus, and the chapter listings also play video loops of the chapters rather than just using a still image.


Figure 6: Break your video into chapters.


Figure 7: Create your menus.

Once you've done this, you're ready to go. A great feature is that you can preview an interactive version of your project to make sure it looks as expected before finishing up. You have the option to burn a DVD on the spot, but I chose to create an ISO file to burn later since I knew I wanted to make multiple copies anyway. As expected, it took a while to process the project. This was a fairly small project at a little under 800 MB and it took about 25 minutes to process. Larger projects would obviously take longer. Once I created my DVDs they worked flawlessly and looked great.


Figure 8: Finish your project.

Conclusions
I'm very satisfied with this software. It performed well on my older computer and did exactly what it promised to do. After running through it a few times I'm confident that I can create a professional looking DVD very quickly with just the wizard mode. I'm also impressed that this software will grow with me since I've not even entered the full editor mode.

Chris Gohlke is a Contributing Editor for Digital Media Thoughts. He loves Sci-Fi and loves to get his hands on real-life tech gadgets. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, USA with his wife and three cats.