Review by Steffan Piper

I thought the best way to review this product was to break it down to a very select points:nnThe Good …

1. The DV-DVD conversion tool is incredibly fast and allows you go back through old archived DV tapes and watch them digitally and begin the process of editing.

2. The Dolby Digital 5.1 feature allows you to fully control your project so you can offer enhanced sound, booting the overall quality. This is a fantastic addition for amateur and work-man level student film-makers on a budget.

3. Very easy editing tools that are `smart’ and perfect for the user that has never edited anything in their life, allowing them to create pro-sumer level presentations. A lot of these programs typically assume that the user has a basic amount of working knowledge.

4. The Smartsound Auto Music Maker - is an interesting tool that allows you to incorporate royalty-free and public domain music which I hadn’t seen anywhere else.

5. Direct upload to Youtube - more and more programs are offering this service and rightly so. The software uploads a low res version of your video to the internet so you you can easily share your work.

The Bad …

1. I found performance different over three different computers that have very similar, but yes, different hardware. If you don’t have 2 GB’s of RAM Memory AT LEAST, then this program is going to struggle and probably crash on you frequently. I have a computer with 4 GB of RAM and it rendered the HD content without error but over many hours. AT 2GB of RAM it became a nightmare and I experienced lock-ups and had to not touch the computer once I started to render and turn off all power-saving functions on my computer so that it wouldn’t crash. My 1.6 GB RAM Computer constantly crashed and I had to switch to using the DVD Wizard in order to create a project … which just isn’t the same.

2. The 2000K bit-rate limit of MP4 files is absolutely hideous. Breaking your video down into smaller files and then splicing them together is no fun and a bad compromise.

3. Too much emphasis on very lame and kiddie-grade filters, frames and other features that I feel bog this product down with pedantic utilities that are better left to other programs that focus on use by children and those not trying to do something novelty like a Spongebob presentation.

4. This program really is a memory hog and doesn’t manage memory as well as it advertises.

The Ugly …

I can’t really say anything awful about the product except that the documentation is lacking and good luck trying to find comprehensive books written for the software by 2nd party interests. A lack of printed tutorials is really the Achilles heel of this software.

Other than that, Sony’s Vegas Video 8 is a nice substitute, but if you’ve already made the leap into the program, or company, then with a little tinkering and some dedication you could make some very nice looking student level films and projects.

It’s not quite the software that it wants to be yet, but this company is making the effort to continually improve it by making it feature rich and attractive for people trying to make small films on a non-existent budget.

Video Studio X3, which is not yet available, is probably the animal that will do everything that Corel is trying to assert that X2 does and may even make a name for itself, but with X2 … not yet.

But four stars for doing what it does.

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