Review by Phyllis Staff

Corel’s Ulead VideoStudio 11.5 Plus offers an abundance of features. Learning to use them is a real trial.

I moved from Adobe’s Captivate, a program I truly enjoyed using, to VideoStudio 11.5 Plus, because of Adobe’s insistence on flash video. I’m finding that it may be easier and quicker to find a good converter program and convert my videos to flash rather than continue to struggle with VideoStudio.

While feature-rich and compatible with many video formats, the documentation for VideoStudio is poor. The User’s Guide is small and packed with tiny print and graphics. While I feel sure that everything possible has been included in the Guide, reading such tiny print while trying to follow along online is extremely difficult. Searching the Corel website for video tutorials produced a few but not enough basic tutorials for the program.

VideoStudio 11.5 Plus is a good program (from what I can tell so far) at a reasonable price, especially when compared to alternatives offered by Adobe and Sony. It is my hope that Corel will add many online tutorials so that customers will be able to develop their skills to take full advantage of all the features the program offers.

Four stars for the software, one star for documentation, three stars overall.

• Corel