Customer Reviews

Corel VideoStudio X2 [Old Version]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

For 23 years I worked for ABC-TV, maintaining video equipment costing tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. I would have never believed that many of the features of such equipment would one day be available at home for $50 on a PC.

Video Studio X2 is a pleasure to use. It comes with a little instruction book and plenty of on-line documentation but I bet most people could figure out how to make a movie by just playing around with this software. The editing capability on a clip or the entire program is simple and quickly done.

You follow a series of steps to create a flick, but you are always free to jump around and do things in any order you like. A great variety of special effects, transitions and even a painting feature allow great latitude for your creativity.

If you aren't happy with your original footage there are filters for you to doctor it to your satisfaction, changing color temperature is one example. Audio handling is quite flexible as well with handles for you to raise or lower levels to match clips. You can even speed up the audio (to 150% of real-time) without any pitch change.

Most everything is drag and drop and you build up your movie a piece at a time pulling things into place. Then you can add a second track of video to overlay the first. The PRO version will give you more than one overlay track. I used the video overlay feature to do some free-hand drawing on a still photo I took in order to point out features of interest in the photo. You can make a nifty slide show with pan and zoom and narration. It's fun and things come together in no time. Record your on voice to accompany the audio that goes with the video and then add a music track as well (many canned music tracks are included)

Drop shadows on title text, transparency and edge hardness adjustment on text, even chroma keying is available.

I've had no crashes but there is a strange quirk - when I close the program after completing my work I sometimes get a message that tells me "Windows has detected a problem and your program must be closed". This is strange because I already HAVE closed the program, so it doesn't intrude on my use of Video Studio, thank goodness. This is the only reason I don't give the program five stars.

You do need a reasonably fast PC for the program to work smoothly and quickly. I started using it on a single processor running at 2.5gHz with 2 Gig of RAM and there were plenty of momentary hesitations and some jerkiness in previewing, but no crashes. I had to have patience, but everything worked.

Recently, I obtained a dual-core PC and the performance of VideoStudio has been greatly improved in speed with few hesitations now. The faster your hard drive, the better as well. The instruction booklet gives you suggestions on hard disk settings in Windows to optimize VideoStudio performance.

I have not tried capturing analog video. That would require an analog to digital converter card and would be particularly demanding of the PC. DV capture, since DV is already digital, should be no problem.

You should remember to load your movies from your movie camera (or stills from a digital still camera) to a place on your hard drive first, then open them with VideoStudio from their location on the HD. If you leave your movies in your camera, VideoStudio will be happy to work with them by way of the USB port, but once you disconnect your camera, the program will not be able to find them and all the clips you may have created will be empty. By putting the raw files on hard disk first, you can be sure VideoStudio will always find them there.

Movie editing will make you appreciate higher speed uploads because the movies you create (which can be rendered into one of many formats with VideoStudio) will take quite a while to upload to YouTube. ISP's usually offer higher DSL upload speeds along with higher download speeds. I opted for a higher speed package solely for the faster uploading as my web-surfing has been fine with what I have had. I've found that you can multiply your movie running time by 15 or 20 to get your upload time - in other words, a two minute movie would take 20 to 30 minutes to upload, so don't plan on creating a new version of Gone With the Wind!

I highly recommend VideoStudio X2. Every time I turn around I discover it will do another remarkable thing I would not have expected for $50. Go for it.

I bought this product because the Movie Maker program that came with XP crashed every time I tried loading in a video file, plus I wanted to be able to add video, narration and music to play all at once, something MM can't do.

I researched the various products out there, and found a review with the top ten movie editing programs. The first place winner sounded great, but only half the user reviews loved it while the other half hated it for crashing constantly. VideoStudio x2 was the second place winner, but it had far fewer complaints of crashing. I also found it for $40, so I went with it.

The program is a little more complicated than MM, but easy enough to figure out without reading the manual if you're comfortable with how MM works. It worked with my video files without a hitch. The number of transitions, special effects and titles is substantial, and the zoom and pan controls can be custom tweaked exactly how you like.

The negatives:

The animation tool (rotoscoping) is pretty basic--lots of different paint brushes, but that's about it--you have to draw every line freehand. Worse, I drew a lot of animations over maps (so a line would animate to follow a route), but after rendering I found the final product had the animations all shifted off from where they were supposed to be. Thus they were useless. I'd really like to see this tool upgraded with more drawing tools and better rendering results.

I tried rendering the final film in MPEG-2 format and ended up with an ugly, distorted mess. But in .wmv format the results look terrific in HD (although a 9.5 minute video takes about 560 mb of disk space).

The program does occasionally crash, but not so often that it caused me problems. And it almost always crashes upon closing (again, no problems there).

Otherwise, excellent. If you want to see what I created with it, go to YouTube and search for "Guiding in the Galapagos" to bring up the four-part series.

Much to my surprise this package had a "Wizard" which made production of a quick video extremely easy. Once the production was made you could use it as is or use the extensive editor and tweak it until it was perfect. I had started out using Adobe Premiere and found it's menu system rather hard to get use to and hard to remember if I had not used it for a while. With Corel, I could start with the Wizard and then make changes after that.

As others had mentioned I do sometimes get an error message when exiting the program but it does not seem to effect anything.

I found this software very difficult to use but maybe just because it was seemingly incompatible with my computer. I bought it because I wanted to try some video editing. When I opened the program, I was able to bring in jpegs and arrange and edit them for slide shows. When I clicked on a video clip however, the software just shut down. I uninstalled, reinstalled and still had the same program. I even restored my computer to an earlier date and tried a third time with the same result. I asked the seller for a refund whiich was immediately refused. The seller claimed the product was new and was factory sealed. It was sealed only by tape and it had tiny scratches on it which may have been the problem. While the seller refused a refund, Amazon had a different perspective, lucky for me and I recieved a full refund on the product.

Software does well as long as you work in sequence.Deviate, and likely it will lock up. It's still worth it,lots of features

I have not yet tried capturing analogue vhs movies, but to make DVDs from digital is a piece of cake. Installation was no problem except that the serial no. for the CD was not labeled as such. You have to just use common sense and figure that it must be the long list of numbers on the sleeve. Anyway, I am pleased so far.

For the beginner it's an ok program. I seemed to have problems when it came to speeding up clips. It would close the whole program down. Even after doing updates from Corel's website. Other than that it's been a pretty cool program to work with. It's good for the price you pay for it!

First of all, I'm fairly tech savvy. That being said, this is the worst software I have come across in years. I'll make a long story short. It hangs, it freezes, it hogs resources. I installed and uninstalled it numerous times and it still hung to the point of forcing me to do a manual reboot of the system because attempting a normal shut down of the computer also hung because of whatever this program was trying to do.

I'm packing it right back up and returning it. I'll stick with Roxio or Nero.

To make things worse, the Corel support site is a nightmare.
BEWARE!!!!!

This is a great software for anyone who is into making short movies. Editing can be a bit of a challenge though, so I am still in the process of getting to understand the software. Over all, it is a good buy. The delivery was fast and you'll definitely get to make some good quality movies