Corel Videostudio X2 Pro Ultimate

Video Studio X2 Pro Ultimate is a video suite based around Corel’s latest incarnation of the video editor which started life as a Ulead product, often bundled with video capture cards.

Having got through to version 12 (called X2 in Corel’s numbering system), you can probably guess that most of the video-editing basics are covered. You can import video clips from camera, disc or hard disk in a variety for formats, edit them on a timeline with captions, overlays, picture-in-picture effects, narrations and soundtracks, and export to disc, media player or even Youtube.

The main new feature is Painting Creator which not only lets users add paint effects overlaid onto videos, but also to have any sequence of painting actions recorded as a macro so they can be added to the timeline themselves and played back automatically. This adds a lot of scope for customising the look and feel of finished videos.

Most of the other improvements are extensions rather than fundamentals, things like an increase in the number of tracks where you can overlay graphics and captions, from one to two. You can now also add transition effects to the overlay tracks as well as to the main track, making overlays more flexible.

There are three other programs in the X2 Pro Ultimate suite: WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray, DVD Copy 6 Plus and Steinberg WaveLab LE 6 Audio Editor.

WinDVD needs little explanation, as it’s already one of the best-known DVD players for Windows. As the name suggests, the latest version handles Blu-ray disc playback and reproduces HD movies with no noticeable artefacts. It can sca le up standard DVDs to somewhere near HD quality, too.

DVD Copy 6 Plus handles DVD and CD copying, as long as there’s no Digital Rights Management (DRM) on the files. It can handle HD content and can convert for iPod, iPhone, Zune and other players and consoles.

Often underrated, Steinberg’s WaveLab LE 6 audio editor can take audio tracks from many different sources and produce multi-channel audio. With a suitable input, such as a USB pre-amp for your sound source, it can be used to resurrect audio from cassette or vinyl disc, too.