The photo and video editing applications are straightforward enough. Lining the top of the window in the photo editing utility are icons that invoke an automatic picture-cleanup macro, plus basic tools for cropping and for adjusting contrast, color saturation, poor lighting, and red-eye problems. In the video editing tool, a timeline along the bottom displays thumbnails of still images pulled from the video's frames; you can put in music and do basic editing, including adding text and credits. Along the right edge, in both applications, a more-detailed set of menus let you make more-specific adjustments. But just getting into the editing apps was a chore: I had to first permit the program to find, index, and generate a metadata database entry for all the photos and/or videos that I wanted to work with--a slow process.

The DVD Factory program lets you burn your produced videos to a recordable DVD, complete with custom on-screen menus. And the Corel WinDVD player, in theory, can play back files in most video formats or discs. I found that it typically played XviD-encoded AVI files both upside down and reversed left-to-right, so watching these files play was like watching TV while hanging upside down looking at the screen in a mirror.

The suite's stated minimum system requirements--a dual-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, a 256MB graphics board--far exceed what I would expect to need for a low- to intermediate-level media suite. I tested Digital Studio on both a very high end workstation and a four-year-old homebuilt computer, and, oddly enough, it was more responsive on the latter (the older PC), though I wasn't thrilled with the performance on either machine.