Review by H. Wang

I have been making home videos for years. I used VideoStudio 7, 9, X1, X2 plus, X3 Plus, X4,X5 and now the latest X6. I also tried digital video softwares from Pinnacle, Roxio, Adobe Premiere. However, Corel software beats them for stability and easy of use. The Adobe Premiere is a great software, but it’s overwhelming and overkill for most of us. In general, Corel’s VideoStudio is less frustrating than any other softwares.

From product line point of view, Corel VideoStudio has all the basics, not a lot of bells and whistles that are hard to learn. The basic functions are easy to use and intuitive. You use the timeline to place video clips, then add transitions, background music, titles. After you are done, it can be easily exported to YouTube, FaceBook, Flicker…etc. Or you can burn your own DVD, or Blu-Ray disks.

By the way, editing HD videos requires a very powerful PC system, this is especially true if you are dealing with the highly compressed AVCHD videos. My system configuration is: Core i7 processor, 12 GB ram, Window 7 64-bit, 1GB video card, two SATA-2 drives. I have no problem to advance AVCHD videos frame by frame for precise editing, or to fast forward AVCHD videos for quick preview…etc. Also, the rendering time is fast. During rendering, my CPU usage can go up to 90%. If you see frame drop, out-of-sync between audio and video, color bleaching, software is slow to response to mouse clicking, video editing process is not smooth…etc, before blaming VideoStudio software, you may want to check your hardware system first.

Here is one trick I learned from professional Video Magazine. While running the VideoStudio with you main hard drive (like C-drive), you should put all video files (both the video input files and video output files) in a separate hard drive. Doing so can ensure a better system performance. With my system, if I put all the video files in the C-drive where the main program resides, from time to time, the VideoStudio program will still hang (not response to your mouse) for couple of second (not crash). This hanging problem goes away once I put videos files at a separate hard drive (not the C-drive).

So far, I have done couple home videos and created some AVCHD disks. I am very happy with the latest VideoStudio X6. Especially the newly added subtitling support.

Though I have long experience with VideoStudio, I would definitely recommend this software to beginners. It comes with so many pre-packaged automated processes that beginners can use them easily.