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(More customer reviews)Corel Visual Studio Pro x4
The new release of Visual Studio Pro, x4, fixes most of the bugs from earlier versions as well as offering new features such as 3-D, time-lapse and stop-action effects, and the option to zip projects. I have little use for the new features but the bug-fixes are a huge improvement in the program.
VSP x3 seemed to work better with high-end systems. I have an 1-7 930 processor overclocked to 4 GHz with a GTX460 video card, blu-ray burner, and 12 GB of RAM and have experienced none of the crashes that others using older equipment report. Pro x3 occasionally would freeze up during rendering, but VSP Pro x4 has yet to crash or freeze on my system.
The biggest drawback to Pro x3 was that it came packaged with DVD Movie Factory 2010: a separate, highly-defective program necessary for creating and burning DVDs that almost never worked without freezing. Not completely oblivious to this disaster, Corel responded by offering DVD Movie Factory 7 SE for free and DVD Movie Factory 7 (full version) for sale on their web site. Neither of these programs imports the chapters you set up in Visual Studio, so you have to set your chapter points all over again when you create your DVD--which rather obviates the purpose of setting up chapter points in VSP, what? The full version of DVD Movie Factory 7, while offering more menu and theme options, produced AVCHD DVDs with little slips in them. (The SE version produced them without the slips.)
Pro x4 has addressed these issues by incorporating the DVD factory into the Visual Studio program itself (as they had done with earlier versions.) Your chapter points are now retained, AVCHDs don't slip, and you don't freeze up when creating DVDs. However, there are a few less menu options available than with the full version of DVD Movie Factory 7 and the screens you work with are no longer full-screen, so you can't see as clearly. On the pro side, comparable blu-ray disks consume less disk space in Pro x4.
Visual Studio Pro offers flexibility with libraries that is missing from the other video editing programs I've seen. In particular, the program allows you drag a clip from the library to the timeline (or storyboard), edit it, and then drag the edited version back into the library for later use. You can then access both the original and the edited clip in this or another project. As I find this feature essential and have not seen it elsewhere, VSP is the only editor that works for me. Others who have tested VSP against the competition find that rendering times are fastest with VSP. Generally the interfaces are user-friendly, although some customizing of the filters is neither intuitive or adequately explained. You learn by experimenting. One tip: when you are trimming a clip, click on the digital time display (either the frames or seconds--they call it the timecode) and then use the up and down arrows on the keyboard to advance or reverse the clip. This moves you through the clip as fast as you can click, whereas the right and left arrow buttons produce a delayed response unless you click them slowly. The scrubber is imprecise and best used for obtaining a general location.
Earlier versions of VSP would occasionally mishandle very short clips: reduce them to microsecond flashes that were overlayed. I have tested Pro x4 and found that this problem, too, has been fixed. I also noticed that in earlier versions if you chose higher rendering settings than those native to your clips, the resulting video file would appear with extra noise. With Pro x4, the quality of the clips actually improves when you render with a higher resolution: definition is slightly sharper with noise reduced and colors look cleaner. The improvement isn't enough to mistake them for HD, but it's noticeable nonetheless. In addition, the "take a snapshot" bug (where the snapshot is distorted) has been fixed.
I don't have a 3-D TV, nor do I have use for time-lapse or stop-action so obviously I can't report on the these new features. However, Pro x4 has exterminated many of the bugs from previous versions and now earns recommendation without reservation especially for those using high-end systems.
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