Review by H. Wang

I have been making home videos for years. I used VideoStudio 7, 9, X1, X2 plus, X3 Plus, and now X4 Ultimate. 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.

Once a while, bad batch did occur (like Microsoft’s Vista), the VideoStudio X3 was slow and crashed a lot. The VideoStuido X4 has significantly improvements. It integrates the disk authoring tool. So I don’t need to run separate tool to burn DVD or Blu-ray disk. Also, VideoStudio X4 is extremely stable….I haven’t run into any crash after several home video projects.

However, editing HD videos requires a very very powerful CPU, 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 feel 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 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 all videos files at a separate hard drive.

So far, I have done 4 home videos and created 4 AVCHD disks. I am very happy with the latest VideoStudio X4.

By the way, they don’t include the bonus winZip pro software in the package. You have to download the winZip pro software from their web site. But the provided key does not work with the download winZip pro. I take 1 point out due to this.