Now under the stewardship of Corel, Ulead's competent VideoStudio product nonetheless faces some familiar problems. Firstly, it has at heart a relative simplicity, which it fails to offset properly against more advanced tools for experienced users (although it does try). This instantly slims down its market. And secondly, while a fine product in its own right, the competition is, to be blunt, better.

Still, it's as intuitive as you can reasonably expect it to be. We put the product to the test with an hour of DV footage, on a camera connected to our test PC via FireWire. It picked the connection up easily enough and we were capturing the footage from the camera in good time. In fact, even to get to that stage we'd bypassed one of the many ways VideoStudio tries to simplify matters, as we turned down its offer to simply transfer our DV content to DVD, untouched by any form of editing. User-friendliness is certainly a mantra here.

The editing is good fun, although we found it easier to work with the added flexibility that something like Pinnacle's Studio offers. Nonetheless, thanks to a variety of templates, easy-to-get-to-grips-with tools and a selection of options that give you welcome control over your creation without being over-daunting, we were soon happily working away. We found it straightforward to play with titles, add a few effects and overlay fresh audio, while the output side of things is efficient and clear.

We also appreciated the option for blue screen work if we wanted to, which gives an idea of the sophistication of some of the effects contained within the software. However, that feature, along with support for the likes of HD DVD, is a luxury that sounds impressive on the box, but is unlikely to be touched by 95 percent of the program's users.

VideoStudio, for our money, is content with being good rather than striving to be great. The more advanced controls are welcome, but compared to a Premiere Elements, they don't quite measure up. There's also a none-too-kind split between the Standard and the Plus editions (with extra shekels required to get hold of the latter - £20 to be exact), which denies purchasers of the former the chance to output into a variety of portable formats.

At its best the program does get results, and with some speed. For beginners in particular it's a perfectly good piece of video editing software. Version 11 has improved things a little, certainly feels tighter than before, and will more than hold the ship steady until the inevitable version 12 moves it on a few nudges more. However, the stiffness of the competition in this particular sector is the undoing of VideoStudio, and while we're happy to commend it, it's not our first choice and neither should it be yours.

A good, well-rounded video editing package that suffers in comparison to some of its stronger rivals.