Though Ulead's VideoStudio isn't the best pure video editor in its class, it's quite capable, and no tool converts DV tapes to DVD faster. More important, none can edit HDV more quickly. In fact, many apps have no HDV support at all. Throw in a cool new DVD menu paradigm and you've got a product worth considering. In fact, these extra abilities push VideoStudio over the top, making it an Editors' Choice in addition to Adobe Premiere Elements.

VideoStudio 10 comes in a standard version ($69.99 direct) and Plus version ($99.99).The latter, which I tested after an uneventful installation, includes support for HDV, 5.1 surround sound, and up to six overlay tracks. Both versions offer three editing options: the VideoStudio Editor, the Movie Wizard, and the DV-to-DVD Wizard.

Ulead provides a good complement of basic editing tools, including the unusual Multitrim feature, which lets you quickly pull scenes from longer video files. That, combined with storyboard and timeline tools as well as an increasingly functional interface (good riddance to the early boom-box–inspired look), make the editing function quite usable. Like almost all similar products, VideoStudio can do auto-scene detection and use what it finds to create chapters on its own.

The biggest new feature in the main editor is HDV editing, a capability that's becoming more common as consumer HDV camcorders come to market. But this high-resolution compressed format can slow many video editors to a frustrating crawl, even on a powerful system. Ulead solves the problem by creating low-resolution "proxy" files that you actually use during editing, and referring back to the HDV source for final rendering.

Though creating the proxy files can take a long time (about 3 hours 20 minutes for a 60-minute video file on a 3.2-GHz HP 4100 Workstation), the technique worked very well in my tests. And as Ulead already introduced the technique late last year in its prosumer editor MediaStudio, most of the kinks seem to have been worked out.

I've always loved VideoStudio's ability to scan DV tapes at 6X speed, identifying scenes for subsequent batch capture. With the DV-to-DVD wizard, you can choose the desired scenes, pick a menu scheme, walk off, and return to a finished DVD, reducing your editing and authoring time to just a few minutes. In version 10, you can automatically convert an entire DV tape, and store and print the scene and time-code information from the quick scan to paper, providing a unique archival function Basically, you can quick-scan your tapes, print the time-code information with thumbnails, and know what's on the tape in the future.

On the authoring front, Ulead introduced a menu that uses one large window for preview, instead of multiple buttons that are generally too small to play discernable video. (Competing products, such as iDVD, Pinnacle Studio, MyDVD, and Premiere Elements, put three to six little icons on a single menu.)

When viewing the DVD, you press a button in this SmartScene menu to select a video, which appears in the single large player window on the playback device. It's an elegant effect unavailable in any other authoring program—whether for Windows or Mac—that I'm aware of.

I have to pause the highlight reel here, though, to discuss some of VideoStudio's subpar features—some important, some not. Chroma-keying, which lets you put any background behind your subject, again proves unimpressive. And the new image stabilization feature compares poorly with what CyberLink PowerProducer and Pinnacle Studio offer. Also, the program lacks automatic color correction, slow-motion video produces too much flicker (as did one of my two pan-and zoom-trials), and I still find the audio mixer clumsy.

On the other hand, encoding performance was good—getting a 12-minute test clip into MPEG-2 format took just 17 minutes 46 seconds, compared with 19:49 for Premiere Elements and a dreadful 63:46 for Cyberlink PowerDirector. VideoStudio can also produce video for the Sony PSP and Apple iPod—features that cost extra with PowerDirector.

Overall, VideoStudio hasn't persuaded me to uninstall Premiere Elements, but its impressive HDV abilities have persuaded me to leave both on my system.