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Ulead's MediaStudio Pro (MSP) has always been praised more for performance than polish, and has excelled at a few targeted operations rather than maintained a high bar throughout the spectrum of editing activities. MSP 8 ($399.99) continues in that tradition, with several standout features, but also some notable weaknesses.
Overall, there's clearly enough new and improved functionality to woo current MSP users into upgrading ($249.99), and editors who've reached the limits of the Pinnacle Studio/Adobe Premiere Elements/Ulead VideoStudio class of products may also want to have a look. However, those already settled on a prosumer editing program or suite at the Premiere Pro/Final Cut Pro/Vegas/Edition/Xpress level will find little to make them change their minds. That said, MSP's new Smart Compositor and power-efficient proxy HDV editing are well worth a look for producers whose particular needs play to those strengths.
INTERFACE CHANGES
Ulead has made multiple interface and functional changes to MSP's basic timeline in version 8, and most are for the better. The interface is now very flexible, with resizeable, dockable panels which resist clutter much more effectively than the floating windows used in previous versions. You design from the bottom up, with titles and overlays over the background tracks, which is much more intuitive than the previous top-down approach.
The preview window remains on the upper left, but also serves as the source window, with tabs on top for switching between the two views. A new effects manager lets you quickly see and adjust all effects inserted into a clip, with a much larger keyframe area enabling faster, more precise adjustments.
Ulead eliminated the Video A and Video B tracks in favor of single-track editing, where you insert transitions by overlapping two clips together on any track. Unfortunately, you can't use transitions at the beginning and end of clips, a convenience offered by most other programs that utilize this single-track approach. For example, with Premiere Pro, to add a fade-in to a title on track 4, you simply drag a fade-in transition to the front of the title. In MediaStudio, you have to create a one-second black "color clip" in the program, then drop that on the beginning of the target clip, and MSP will fade between the two automatically.
Most significantly, MSP...