Hello all. Either it's well hidden or the 'full' featured Nero 6 Ultra is lacking a simple brightness and contrast edit control for movie clips in it's Vision Express 3. If someone would be so kind and point it out to me, That would be great.

I'm a little perturbed that my $100 doesn't even get me that, when the freebie Arcsoft Video Impression 2 that came with my Canon PowerShot A75 (which I'm not enjoying terribly) has an easy to locate and easy to use set of controls for brightness and contrast for movie clips. Once you've used them, you can then 'publish', or save the edited clip, to whatever location on your hard drive you select.

I also bought THE BOOK OF NERO 6, by Wallace Wang. And in the section titled 'Editing Digital Video Files', there's zip on those basic settings. There's other stuff of course. But I've never been able to use Nero's advanced functions. That's just the level I'm at. I've always been happy that Nero has simply done the basic job that I wanted it to do. Until now, That's been mostly burning audio cds.

My new camera takes stills and movie clips. Naturally, I wanted a program that would put them together in an interesting fashion on a cd. I had an incomplete version of Nero 6 (which wouldn't upgrade from my earlier OEM version 5 Nero), without realizing that it was incomplete. I bought the book in order to know how to use it. That's when I realized that I needed to buy the whole suite in order to have the particular apps I needed. I didn't realize at the time that the Arcsoft that came bundled with my camera does essentially what I wanted. (I've found Arcsoft, bundled with other HP products I've bought, to be complicated and not user friendly, so I mostly ignored it when I got more of it bundled with my digital camera. Perhaps it's not complicated to those who know how to do video editing. But to me, it was too complicated. Without plain English 'explanation' for features and names, it will remain so.)

However, When I use the 'publish' feature of Arcsoft, which allows me to do the basic editing of my movie clips, somehow a high-pitched whining noise is added into the sound, ruining the clip and slideshow. I've 'published' one clip and one slideshow made with Arcsoft and both contain the offending whine.

I thought that perhaps the 'export' feature in Nero 6 was equivalent to the 'publish' feature in Arcsoft. But if it is, I don't see any option to adjust brightness and contrast. Which strikes me as very odd.

And the editing tools that accompany the Nero 6 PhotoSnap viewer are complicated and anything but user friendly. Otherwise, They woul be most welcome in an image viewer. It's something that windows picture viewer lacks. On the other hand, Just as useful as editing capability in the viewer (if it was good) is the ability to simply delete the file one is looking at. There's no delete button in PhotoSnap. How did Nero miss this? I've reset my default image viewer to windows. Never mind that Nero 6 didn't ask me when it stole that default.

windows xp home, Pentium 4, 1.7 GHz, 1 Gig SDRAM, Asus PB4 mb, ATI AIW graphics card 32 DDR, SoundBlaster Live 5.1, Asus 16x cd rom, Plextor 24/10/40A cd burner, cable connection to the net

Thanks in advance. Later...

Let me answer my own question, since no one else wants to and the answer might be of use to others. Virtual Dub allows for quick and dirty editing of the kind that I seek. Nero 6 Ultra doesn't have the ability. VD is free. It isn't clear how to use virtual dub, so please fool with it a bit. You won't have to fool with it much before you learn how to use it. You simply select and apply filters and then test them by playing your video. If the guess (percent of adjustment applied) is wrong, you just delete the filter, reapply it at a different strength and play the adjusted video again.

Later...