Corel VideoStudio by John F. Wright

I find Corel VideoStudio fairly easy to use (as far as video conversion and editing goes). I’ve previously used a wide array of video tools (Adobe Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas, Ulead VideoStudio, Pixela ImageMixer, Nero Vision Express, Pinnacle Studio, ArcSoft Showbiz, Virtual Dub and even high end expensive professional products like EDIUS). Currently Corel’s VideoStudio is the nicest I’ve used (of course this isn’t completely fair as many of the other products no doubt have newer improved versions too).

I don’t notice much difference between VideoStudio X5 and X9. I’m sure they added some nice things but they haven’t jumped out at me. For me the biggest change has been the phenomenally increased speed on Win 10 64 bit vs 32 bit WinXP (much of this improved performance is due to the hardware though).

Batch convert is the feature I use the most. This is an excellent way to convert files from one container and form of compression to another.

One of my complaints about all video editing software is a lack of in context explanations of the various choices. How is a novice supposed to know the difference between H.264-Baseline, H.264-Main and H.264-High?nnVideoStudio is easy to drag and drop clips together in a project and to drag and drop transitions between the clips to produce a nice final project. A lot of tasks are intuitively easy (whereas other software leaves to reading through poor documentation to try and figure out how to do something).

Almost every company wants to sell you new version after new version year after year. At least Corel provides some very nice (low cost) upgrade offers. Certainly some of the time you’ll want to take advantage of the upgrades to utilize new hardware abilities or a new software feature but generally I find it’s reasonable to go several years between upgrades.