Only a decade ago, the first association when video editing was mentioned would be huge desks with a large number of buttons and bars in all sizes and colours, with special CRT monitors and Beta video recorders neatly stacked in front. Working with this equipment was anything but simple. Video editing is one of the best examples of computers speeding up and simplifying data manipulation. The editing room of today consists of a single strong PC with lots of storage space and a good monitor. Everything else is under software control. However, powerful video editing programs are still way too expensive for the ordinary home user, and their interface is often neither easily understandable nor intuitive.At one time Ulead, and today under Corel’s shelter, VideoStudio Pro, currently in its X3 version, has walked an entirely different path. Its goal has always been to bring the video editing process down to the masses, to enable each PC user to effortlessly edit his/her home videos in a professional way. If you doubt the sheer genius of this logic, have a look at the trend of cheapening camcorders, now fully comparable to digital camera prices, and the increasing presence they are getting in home environment.
In accordance with its “simplifying” philosophy, Corel VideoStudio Pro X3 offers two types of working environment to the end-user - some sort of linear wizard and a full-fledged editor which requires the user to be a bit more attentive, but provides something of a customized result. Express tools, three of which are present, are therefore intended for quick editing. VideoStudio Express 2010 is intended for simply generating an output video file from a variety of sources. Besides the expected DV and memory card cams (or those with integrated HDDs or DVD writers), as well as DVD’s or a local (network) HDD, you can also grab material from digital cameras, mobile phones, webcams, even real-time capture from a TV card.
Although it doesn’t seem to offer a lot of options at first glance, VideoStudio Express offers a few useful things when in editing mode. To mention a few, you have cutting off unneeded video parts, image rotation, audio signal regulation etc. at disposal. Options that should be of particular interest are those that enable you to rectify badly chosen recording settings. This means: white balance correction, ambient light intensity, removing colour noise and the rest of the common problems that plague recordings made in poor light conditions. Perhaps the most useful option in this part of the program is the possibility of image stabilization. Modern camcorders often include optical zoom of tenfold proportions, which allows for capturing details at great distance, but produces noticeable jerk in the video itself, especially when done “by hand”. This stabilization feature calculates the maximum jerk frequency and performs additional zoom in the picture, so that it’s always the same part of the image that’s being displayed, and a special algorithm does the “calming” afterwards. In ideal conditions, the resulting video will provide a perfectly stable image, but even if not all jerk could be accounted for, the output file is much “calmer” than the original.
After the editing is done, VideoStudio Express 2010 offers templates which you can use to make interesting video clips and images ready for uploading to YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, saving to a mobile device, burning to a CD or sending the file to VideoStudio Pro for further editing, in just a few clicks.
