Review by KJN

All I can say is Wow! This is by far the best video software that Corel has published to date. Installed flawlessly on my Win 7 Core i7 PC, and I was up and running quickly, having used previous versions. This package has so many features that it’s moved the learning curve up a few notches. Beginners may feel uncomfortable with it, but for an experienced video editor, the software has so many features. It’s not going to rival Adobe Production Premiere CS6, but then it doesn’t cost thousands of $’s either.

This new version adds some fun features like motion tracking and stop motion. I hooked the PC up to my Canon 40D DSLR camera to test out the stop motion, and it detected the camera right away, and I had fun using the software to snap a dozen shots or so to make a short video. For each shot, the last shot shows on the screen and the next scene is superimposed over the top, so you have an idea of the shot-to-shot movement in the scene. Clicking a button on the computer screen trips the camera shutter, and then you can set up the next shot. Autofocus is disabled, so you need to manually focus each shot - not a big deal if the distance to the subject doesn’t change. At any time you can view the video that you’ve built so far just by clicking on the play button on the screen.

The motion tracking is easy to set up as well, although setting up objects or text to follow the tracked object is a little trickier. The playback speed adjustment feature is another handy feature that I tried out on some ski video I shot with my Contour helmet cam. There are limitations to how fast the video can play without it coming out jerky (7x, for example), but at 2x speed the video is quite smooth. The menus and text features are plentiful and powerful. The special effects in this Ultimate version are also quite numerous, almost overwhelming, and some require tutorials to use effectively. There are online tutorials which I haven’t fully explored yet. I can visualize this software keeping me satisfied and learning for quite some time.