I've installed videoman 3.0 on four different windows 2000 boxes and tried to encode 1 movie file. The program keeps freezing on me. installed it on 4 win 2000 windows. And even tried it on my win xp system. all are atleast P4 with 512 ddr ram and good video cards.

After auditioning several video editing packages, I settled on Video Man for its excellent value for the money. Video Man had all the features I was looking for and even several that are just really cool.

The number and quality of the included transitions is better than any other package I tried; there are several filters included which can really spice up any production; very flexible titling capabilities; inset video; the ability to cross-fade and perform other effects on the audio tracks; and chroma key features only begin to describe many of the advanced features you see in this package. And as far as the quality of these features, they all seem to work very well. I must commend them for packing so much useful capability into a product for that price.

But why am I giving them such a poor rating? Well basically after paying my registration fee and seeing what happens when you actually can render the video, I have found out that while they have been able to implement these difficult features, they haven't been able to get the simple things right!

My first complaint is that I cannot get the audio and video to be in sync when I render the video. In my particular application I am making Video CD's at 29.97fps, so maybe it is specific to that application, but my source material is all recorded at 29.97fps and all my settings are set to 29.97fps, so it is inexcusable that the software cannot keep the audio and video in sync.

Second problem is the truly awful navigation capabilities of this tool. To select an area in the timeline for preview, I have not yet been able to easily specify a selection. You can drag the left of right side of the current selection to a new point, but this only works if the selection is in the current window. Otherwise you have to SET the left or right point which in essence slides the entire selection to the left or right. All I want to do is to pick the left and right parts of the selection independently, but instead I must do the following: 1) set the left (or right) edge of the selection; 2) zoom out until my entire selection bar is visible (and by the way, there is no zoom out button--you have to guess what scale you want and set it manually); 3) drag the opposite edge to approximately where I want it; 4) zoom back in; 5) fine tune the edge of the selection.

And speaking of preview, the preview screen is very awkward, and I haven't been able to make it work reliably. Most of the time there is no sound at all, although I think the problem here is that you need to do a quick render of the preview selection first and then the audio is available. This additional step seems unnecessary and is very cumbersome, and as noted above, results in audio which is not in sync with the video anyway!

I have contacted Stoik several times via their online support about these problems and have not yet received even a single response. This is despite the fact that I am a paying customer.

Some of these problems may be due to the fact that I am using VideoMan 3.0 on Windows XP which isn't specifically supported, so perhaps this is an unfair review. However, I must rate this software completely poorly since it is entirely useless to me due to the audio sync problem. I must say I cannot recommend this software.