We took the time to download the trial of VideoStudio X2. It has features very similar to Pinnacle Studio 12--especially the look of either the clip or timeline windows. If you load the clip interface you can drag clips to "boxes" and then drag transitions to the small boxes in between. You can also switch to the timeline window which gives more information.
VideoStudio X2 also gives you the option of using the pen tool to "write" anything you want on a video clip. Nice feature but could be overused quite easily.
VideoStudio lets you:
- edit standard and HD movies
- edit photos and photo slideshows
- has an on board Movie Wizard
- lets you burn your movies to DVD with menus
- lets you share movies in psp, ipod, iphone and Youtube formats
- includes WinDVD to play dvds on your computer
- includes dvd templates
The feature set is quite high. We had all sorts of trouble with splitting movies into scenes. When you right click on a movie that you have imported you choose "split movie into scenes" and can then choose from "by time code" or by "content". There is a slider to choose the sensitivity. We tried the program with mpeg clips and even short clips of 3-4 minutes ended up with 90-100 scenes each no matter where we would drag the sensitivity slider. Our guess is that this works much better with footage imported from MiniDV and other digital clips.
Unless you've purchased your computer in the past 6 months to a year and have LOTS of ram, good luck. Unlike Pinnacle Studio on a fast machine, it seems painfully slow.
Although the program has some really nice features, you better do a test drive first and download their trial program and give it a go to see how it runs on your computer.
We emailed their support team with two questions and never got a response. Not a good sign of high quality customer support.
