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mike McCabe was the kid in my high school who bought the '64 Chevy Nova, jacked up the back, and installed and tuned an 8-cylinder engine so shockingly fast that all the girls wanted a ride. Even the good girls. Once they got in, however, they learned that the high-performance suspension made driving harsh and bumpy and that Mike hadn't paid much attention to the interior, forcing them to avoid grease spots and exposed springs on the seats.
This drove most girls back to the star quarterback, who, when I last saw him at our 20th reunion, was dancing with three girls simultaneously. When you've got it, apparently, you've got it for life. The obvious lesson for Mr. McCabe is that if you want to get the girl, you need high performance and a smooth ride.
It's not just the scarily looming specter of my 30th reunion that leads to these ramblings, it's my experience reviewing Ulead's MediaStudio Pro 7 (MSP), $495 retail, which, like that Chevy Nova, is screamingly fast with other flashes of under-the-hood brilliance. Unfortunately, Ulead doesn't appear to have paid any more attention to ease of use than Mike McCabe did to easy riding.
Of course, once you know where the grease spots and exposed springs of the MSP interface are, you can avoid or work around them, and many users who prize speed over a cushy ride will choose this route. Certainly, MSP's 4X speed advantage in MPEG-2 encoding will drive many high-volume DVD producers in this direction. Still, MSP will just be a really fast car with an unnecessarily jarring ride until Ulead updates the interface, primarily the tiny secondary control screens that haven't been enlarged since the days of the 640x480 screen.
For the record, MediaStudio Pro includes six different modules: an audio editor, character generator, and capture, editing, and video paint tools. Rather than include a special edition of Ulead's excellent authoring program, DVD Workshop, Ulead includes DVD MovieFactory, a $49 consumer-oriented authoring program that lacks even true nested menus.
As with fast month's review subject, Vegas Video, we tested on a Pentium 4 3.OBgHz PC with Hyper-Threading Technology and 512MB RAM running Windows XP Professional, capturing to a freshly formatted 120GB 7200RPM Ultra ATA Seagate Barracuda...