For having kind of an odd layout, this thing actually does quite a bit, including such tricks as reversing or flipping the video.

And no, you’re not going through a time-delay warp when you first fire it up — it takes a good minute to get going.  Keep reminding yourself that it’s free.

To convert a file for VideoStudio:

• In the upper-left box, select ‘AVI’.  Right below it, set the round button to ‘FFmpeg’.  In the upper-middle box, select ‘huffYUV’ if you have lots of spare hard drive space, ‘XviD’ if you don’t.  In the upper-right box, select ‘MP3′.  These setting should all stay in place for next time.
   
• Click in the program with the right mouse button and open the first entry.  Load the file.
   
• In the green video area, set them to ‘NoChange’ and ’29.97′.  Set the ‘Bitrate’ to ’5020′. 
   
• In the blue audio area, set them to ’48000′, ‘Channels – 2′, and the highest number in the ‘Bitrate’ drop-down menu up to 320.
   
• Click the ‘Encode’ button to start the process.

If you need to re-render it, check the checkmark box down near the bottom next to the file name.

It’ll let you know with a big red error message down at the bottom if something’s amiss.  Try using one of the pre-set ‘Video Scale Size’ buttons, rather than ‘NoChange’, and try checking the ‘Disable Audio’ box.  If the audio’s at fault, try ’11025′ or ’22050′, then ’1′ under ‘Channels’.
 

Special Effects

For being just a junky old free converter, the fact that they took the trouble to stick in a bunch of nifty special effects is fairly impressive.  Even more so because I’ll give you five bucks if you can figure out how to access them in the next minute.

Go.

Yep, if you wanted to hide a program’s showiest features, that’s the way to do it!

Click on the small box to the left of ‘DirectShow Decode’, then the box to the right.  Some of this stuff is pretty nice.  Even such cool, hip programs as VirtualDub can’t do most of this.

I used both the ‘Slow Motion’ and ‘Reverse Play’ in a vid clip for a funny blog post I did a while back.  Remember, VideoStudio is a timeline program for lots of clips, pics and audio files, even overlapping, so you can always do something like snip out just one second of the clip, reverse it, then play the two clips back and forth a few times in the middle of a longer clip, just for comedic (or dramatic?) effect.

The DirectShow panel is a little squirrelly; click the ‘Rst’ buttons to clear things out.

And be sure to UN-check the ‘DirectShow’ box when not using one of its special features.  DirectShow is kind of a weird puppy and not all video editors will import them.  We don’t use it except for the special effects.