Ulead Videostudio 7

I spent more than 50 hours trying to learn how to use this product and learning how to work around its bugs. I gave up and bought Sony Screenblast, which is working quite well for me. Here are some problems I had with the Ulead product: The user interface is wildly non-intuitive. Absolutely baffling. Even after 50 hours of intensive effort, I couldnt figure out its behaviors. Also, the help system was clearly tacked on as an afterthought; its in Adobe PDF format, so you cant search it, its hard to read, and the index is laughable. The text is completely inadequate. If you buy this product you will have to use the online web boards (which are actually quite good) to figure out how to use it. They say you can import media and edit it, but this is not actually true. It will edit mpegs captured by other tools, but when you try to burn a DVD it crashes with no diagnostics. A phone call to tech support established that you cannot render a file unless it was captured by VS (Video Studio). (There is a workaround, but the tech support guy didnt know about it.) The output audio is bad, with occasional clicks and pops inserted. On a larger project, it gets horrendously slow. (Other programs, like Screenblast, are slow to load but are quite quick once loaded.) I had one crash, after which VS was no longer able to start. I tried to uninstall so I could re-install, but that caused system errors. Fortunately the original installsheild .exe could uninstall. But this one crash cost me half a day of experimentation just to find the way to re-install. The feature set is not very rich compared to Screenblast at about the same price. Ive also used ArcSoft ShowBiz, which has a lovely interface but cannot render acceptable output. And Ive also used a few really low-end tools. Overall, the money I spent on VS was money flushed down the toilet. And my weeks of work were wasted -- I should have quit earlier. BTW, I have a degree in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley and have been in the software development business for 20 years, so Im not easily intimidated by software.