Corel VideoStudio Pro X6

Doing fun things with video you shoot: Isn't that what it's all about? Corel has a tradition of delivering video-editing software that's easy-to-use yet powerful, including all the latest fun effects and techniques. VideoStudio Pro X6 ($79.99) is no exception, with cool new features like motion tracking for moving effects, even better stop-motion tools, an enhanced screen-capture utility, and a subtitle editor with voice detection. It's one of the few apps that already support 4K Ultra HD video, and it's the only game in town for creating HTML5 interactive web movies. But do all these goodies make VideoStudio the editor for you? Read on to find out.

Installing
Like any powerful video editor, VideoStudio takes a bit of disk space: The installer program was a 1.3GB download, and the installed application took up 1.5GB on my test system, a 3.4GHz quad-core Windows 7 Ultimate PC with 4GB RAM. You can use VideoStudio on PCs running Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista or Windows XP with latest service packs installed?sorry, no Mac version. The regular Pro version includes all the new features, but the Ultimate edition ($99.99 direct) adds pro-level effects from NewBlue, proDAD, and Boris.

I tested on a 3.4GHz AMD quad core Windows 7 Ultimate PC with 4GB RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 4290 graphics adapter?not state of the art, but not too shabby. After okaying the license agreement and entering my serial number, I had to select my country and video output format?NTSC or PAL. The installation took longer than most programs, at a solid 20 minutes. On first run, a dialog tells you that you have to sign into a Corel Community account to use Corel Guide, the splash screen offering tips and tutorials that appears whenever you start the app.

Cool New Features
As I noted, VideoStudio is a pioneer in offering innovative tools that let you create cool new video effects, and the X6 version only builds on these. Before digging into the program's interface and features, let's take a look at what's new:

Motion Tracking. If you've seen high-profile sporting events that show players with on-screen identifying labels that follow them, or even just seen any show that's had to cover up some moving body part or license plate, you've seen motion tracking effects like those VideoStudio X6 now makes possible. You don't need to dig into menus: Just click the Track Motion icon on the toolbar, move the tracker pointer to the object you want to track.

The program creates a path, to which you can apply an overlay that follows your moving object. There are two tracker types?point and area?the latter gave me better results for following a face. Once you have a motion track, you can fine-tune it manually, name it, and save it. So how do you use the track? The easiest thing is to apply a mosaic overlay by clicking a button right in the Motion Tracking dialog; this is good for those body parts or license plates.

For more sophisticated overlays, look to the Match Motion tool. This lets you add not only text or objects that will follow your motion track, but even another video clip! A simple right-click choice from the text or object gets you there, and lets you position it relative to the track.

What impresses me is that Corel didn't just toss in a rudimentary motion-tracking tool in this first introduction of the feature, but rather a sophisticated one with deep customization. You can even have multiple motion tracks with different overlays following them.

Variable speed with key frames. With a clip selected and the Options panel showing, a new choice is Variable Speed. This displays a two-panel window in which you mark key frames to indicate where you want speedups or slowdowns. But note that these speed changes remove the clip's audio. There's no simple freeze-frame effect, though, but you can have a clip (but not a selected part of a clip) play in reverse.

Even more Stop-Motion. VideoStudio was the first major consumer video editor to offer a built-in stop-motion tool, and with X6 this gets even better. The really nifty thing added is that now you can actually control a DSLR from within the software, for hands-off-camera stop-motion shooting. Controls include white balance, image quality/size, exposure settings, and ISO. In my hands on it was actually a little difficult to get the desired results with autofocus using this remote control, but manual focus is also available. These unmatched tools let you create really high quality stop motion movies.

Ultra HD?4K. Sure, there aren't many video cameras that record at this resolution?the most popular is the GoPro Hero3 Black, the next one up in price is a five-grand model from JVC. I had no trouble importing 4K sample clips into Corel VideoStudio Pro X6, even in the base version?CyberLink requires the more expensive version of PowerDirector for this capability. Performance of both preview and program actions slows down considerably, though, when you're editing 4K footage?not surprising, given the very large file sizes. You can also output to 4K with this program.

Captions with voice detection. VideoStudio X6's new Subtitle Editor can detect where in your video speaking occurs, and prompt you to enter subtitle text. You can also manually mark in and out points where the subtitles should appear, or add a time offset for them. The Editor shows waveform to help you know where to add the subtitles. Maybe even cooler is its ability to ingest a subtitle text file and add the subtitles automatically. But the program doesn't tell you how to create one of these (in either UTF or SRT file format), and it doesn't automatically match captions to audio using speech recognition and accept plain text files, the way YouTube's editor does.

HTML5 Support. Still the only major consumer video software with this capability, VideoStudio X5 added HTML5 web code creation for your movies. It lets you add interactive controls to a webpage display of your video so that a viewer using an HTML5-capable web browser can click on linkable overlaid graphics and DVD-like chapters. You can't simply convert an existing movie edit to HTML5; you have to start the project as an HTML5 Video project. There are five templates for HTML5 projects (four of which require downloading), if you don't want to start from scratch. Once you output to a .HTML file, you can tweak the page with your own web-editing tools.

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