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. |
Good software
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