Review by Christopher Powell

My only experience in editing video in the past has been working with Windows Movie Maker and pulling over HDV from tape. Now that I’m using a Canon DSLR for most of my video clips, I picked up the Corel videostudio to add more control and features to my video editing. I’m running it on a Windows 8.1 i5 laptop without issue. I imagine that it works well on Windows 7, but really speeds along without issue. Most of my video editing is archival, cleaning up clips of my kids and labeling them. But for birthdays, its fun to put a video and picture collage together of the last year to reminisce on the happiness and fun times. The kids love that.

The tools initially appear pretty daunting with the cryptic buttons and a lot of tools packed into the screens. I went through a few tutorials to get my bearings, and now am enjoying working with my video, filters, effects, and sound clips. I really can’t rate this against the expensive professional packages, but for a casual video editor that I need, it works well. I like that it has common outputs for facebook, youtube, etc so that posting up is simplified. This is what I needed - if you aren’t sure you can always go to the corel site and download a trial edition and it has all of the same features.