Modest but effective, Deskshare Auto Movie Creator is just robust enough for simple webcam blogging.
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DeskShare Auto Movie Creator 3.21
DeskShare Incorporated
www.deskshare.com/amc.aspx"
$39.95

I'd never heard of DeskShare or their product Auto Movie Creator before starting this review, but they have an impressive little product here. It's a mere $40, but it covers all the basics for capturing, editing, and publishing video quite handily.

The program most generally resembles Microsoft's Movie Maker for Vista, but with some nicer touches. When you capture video, you have a great deal of control, from pre-setting a capture duration to choosing a codec, camera resolution, and many other options. There's even support for DV-deck commands (rewind, fast forward, etc.), but they haven't neglected the plethora of controls that are exposed for most webcams, either. Don't assume your defaults will do the job; feel free to experiment.

The only editing mode for video is a storyboard view -- there's no timeline -- but that will probably not bother people who were not reared on traditional nonlinear editing systems. Splitting or trimming individual clips is a little strange: when you select a given clip to be edited, it brings you into another window where you can use a knife tool to cut the timeline for the clip as needed. The default action is to split the clip into smaller ones, rather than allow existing clips to be trimmed down -- worth noting since people doing capture from a Web camera will most likely be trimming clips rather than splitting longer ones.

When you're finished, the resulting video can be published directly to YouTube, Yahoo! Video, Video Desk, or a generic FTP site. The 30-day trial version watermarks exported video, but that shouldn't get in the way of determining if this little gem is enough for your needs.

Corel VideoStudio Pro X2
Corel Corporation
www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1175714228541
$79.99 / $49.99 upgrade

The Ulead brand of video products now belongs to Corel, and since I had good things to say about Ulead's programs before, I was expecting good things from VideoStudio Pro X2. At $79 for the full version, VideoStudio is also markedly cheaper than Adobe Premiere Elements, and yields results that are at least as impressive.

One key feature that's of major help to video bloggers is the program's tabbed workflow, also seen in the earlier incarnations of the program. This way the capture, edit, and export phases of the production are all clearly separate: a beginner can tell exactly what they need to be doing at any given point in the production.