Corel Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus review

VideoStudio Plus is a home-oriented video-editing application that's packed with features.

The most exciting addition is support for AVCHD, a new camera format that records high-definition AVC (MPEG4) video to hard disk, SDHC card or DVDs. It's a welcome feature, but in practice, AVCHD editing in VideoStudio is cumbersome. Footage can be imported only from camcorders or DVDs, so you can't access clips on the PC's hard disk. Importing from a Sony hard disk-based AVCHD camera was confusing, as the option to Import from Mobile Device found the videos but didn't import them. Instead, we had to select Import from DVD followed by Import DVD Folder and browse to the camera's hard disk.

Once imported, playing a single AVCHD stream with no effects was too much for the software on our Core 2 Duo 6600 PC, giving hopelessly disjointed previews. VideoStudio's Smart Proxy function can generate temporary low-resolution files for smooth previews during editing, returning to the originals for full-quality rendering. However, doing so didn't turn VideoStudio into a lightning-fast application, and it still suffered from inexplicable preview problems and delays.

At the other end of the editing chain is HD DVD authoring. HD DVD drives (and players) are expensive but VideoStudio can write its HD DVD data to DVD media. It's a pity the bundled Intervideo WinDVD 8 Silver can't play HD DVD content.

A selection of new effects is designed to fix colour problems. White balance gets rid of colour casts, either automatically by selecting a preset, or with a colour picker tool that lets you define a neutral part of the image. Auto Tone Adjustment is a simple tick-box for improving exposure, and is much more effective than the crude Auto Exposure effect. The DeSnow and DeBlock effects try to reduce noise and compression artefacts respectively, but both do so at the expense of detail.

Most of the other new features are fairly minor. It's possible to add cue points to the timeline, but you can't easily jump to them. A My Favorites folder in the Transitions list makes the standard Dissolve easier to locate among the mass of transitions. We like the way you can now expand the timeline to view all the active tracks at once, and we're happy to see that chroma keying and transparency are available simultaneously for a clip, a request we made in our review of version 10. However, our bigger criticisms remain unresolved. Previews in effects settings windows are tiny and don't show the results of stacked effects. And why not put effects controls by the preview window, as all other video editors do? We've given up asking for a dedicated button to access effects - bafflingly, the one labelled Effects is for transitions. Many other annoyances make VideoStudio less than pleasurable to use.

VideoStudio has plenty of strengths, but we can't recommend it when its competitors offer more power and precision and much faster operation for just a few pounds more.