Ulead Media Studio Pro 7

Ulead introduces a new version of its flagship desktop editing system suite, injecting lots of realtime features and DVD integration. The company's playing catch-up a bit, as competing programs such as Adobe Premiere have been featuring realtime effects in some form or another for a while now. Still, Media Studio Pro 7 has a few tricks up its sleeve that many of the other programs don't.

First of all, what is "realtime"? The definition I will adopt for this review - and one that holds meaning for Media Studio Pro 7 - is applying an effect or transition to a video project and being able to preview it instantly, with no rendering. That's now easier to achieve with DV editing programs, as companies have shifted from employing dedicated video boards to working entirely within software. If you have a fast machine, the software program can perform the realtime effect itself, essentially just "rendering" a software preview on the fly.

With Media Studio Pro you see the realtime video played back on the preview screen. There are a couple options that allow slower systems to provide delayed preview playback; essentially, there's a toggle to buffer the video to memory for a few seconds before playing.

Ulead claims you can roll three different DV streams, a 3D transition, a motion path, and two graphic overlays on a 2.0GHz Pentium 4. After testing, I found this to be accurate. The more horsepower you have (whether from a fast processor, dual processors, and/or a multithreaded machine), the more realtime fun you will have.

One thing that impresses me about the program is that it allows me to send video back out via FireWire to view video in realtime. So if you have a DV camera hooked up, Media Studio Pro 7 lets you play back the timeline and see it in the camcorder's viewfinder. I ended up taking the analog output of the Sony DV camcorder and hooking it up to my...