Video Capture/Playback:  

We captured from an old JVC camcorder using an USB video transfer connector. The time required to capture our 14 minute video was exactly 14 minutes This 1:1 ratio is standard when pulling from DV tape.

Thanks to VideoStudio’s Smart Proxy technology video playback was smooth. With Smart Proxy editing, users – even on midrange PCs – can enjoy the same benefits as if they were using a high performance video editing workstation. By using lower-resolution files for editing and previewing a project, VideoStudio X2 requires fewer system resources, which results in faster, smoother playback and editing of video. This was especially helpful editing standard definition video, and we can only imagine its beneficial effects on editing HD video, which is much more resource intensive.

In VideoStudio X2, Corel also optimized its usage of dual-core and quad-core CPU systems. We noticed our dual-core system was more responsive and encoded faster than our Pentium 4 3GHz system. A great new feature found in both standard and pro versions of VideoStudio X2.

Editing Tools:  

Whether editing Grandpa’s arthroscopy or your nephew’s birthday party, you need to view your clips in a timeline or storyboard mode, add video, picture, text, audio, and music tracks, and trim/split your video into sections for better continuity, adding transitions, and enhancing with effects (Corel calls them Video Filters).

Once your video is captured, the first thing you want to do is trim and divide the video segment into clips. Trimming is marking the beginning and end of an entire clip, while multi trimming is useful to divide one segment into multiple clips. Multi trimming is extremely useful when you need to remove an inappropriate scene, or mark it for inclusion in a blooper reel. We found VideoStudio X2’s trim and multi trim tools both powerful and easy to use in that we moved frame by frame quickly. It’s important to note that VideoStudio X2 utilizes non-destructive editing, so no matter what you do to a video segment, the original is never permanently cut or overwritten.

So knowing that we couldn’t actually RUIN anything, we decided to let VideoStudio automatically detect scenes and trim accordingly. The results were impressive, as many of what we termed “non productive” segments were trimmed down to their very own scenes which we could move or delete at will. We did find that you'll have to manually add transitions yourself.