Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate & VideoStudio Pro X2 Bundle OLD VERSION

I have used adobe products in the past, full versions and essentials. The main difference Ive seen between this and them (the industries so called leaders) is useability. Anyone can sit down to Corel and use it. Very straight forward, and delievers alot of proffesinal quality features.The biggest seller for me came from VideoStudio. Making full dvds with menus couldnt be easier. Ive made dics with mulitple layers of menus, just like real movie dvds and Ive only opened the manual a few times.Paint Shop Pro Photo has a very nice layout and ease of use. Some more advanced users in photo editing will find a few missing features, or more likely a little less freedom to do some things. But for anyone who takes photos for fun, or as an ametuer hobby, this is more than powerfull enough.Painter Essential Photo - takes pictures and turns them into paintings. A good easy to use program, but it will take time to master. Each photo will behave differently, so you have to "repaint" the photo many times to get the outcome you want. Still a nice throw in.Recover- I dont know if this is even listed, but it comes with a memory card recovery program. So if you accidently delete, or in the case of my parents, format, your camera's memory card, you can still get your pictures. My dad accidently formatted his 4gb SD card with about 1gb of photos on it. I was able to not only pull off the 1gb of photos, but the program found another 2gb of photos they had deleted months earlier.

I've only used PSPPx2 Ultimate for a few weeks. I haven't tried the video half of the bundle yet. So, my comments need to be taken from the perspective of a relative greenie - FWIW. The program is relatively easy to use and has lots of neat features. Basic photo editing has been easy and fun with acceptable results. My initial complaints, however, are:DISCLAIMER - I have not contacted Corel Support and maybe these issues are user induced but, IMHO, they are things that I would not have expected the program to do.1. The program is quite slow - and before you bash my computer - I'm running the latest i7 processor with 6GB of Ram and 1.2TB of disk space. On really large files or big batch edits it runs slowly enough that things time out and freeze up.2. It seems to have a propensity for demoting your color space. This is probably an attempt to remedy the slowness problem. For example, I opened a 9.8MB picture did some basic editing and it demoted it to 8-bit and saved it as a 1.9MB file. I set the compression as low as I could to get the quality as high as I could and I still ended up with a puny little file.3. It doesn't like Nikon Raw (.NEF) files. If I convert a NEF file to JPEG in Capture NX, PSPPx2U won't open it. If I open the raw file in PPSPx2U and save it as a JPEG. Nothing will open it.Again, there may be fixes for these issues that I haven't found yet but they are enough for me to mark the rating down to 3 stars if for no other reason than the frustration factor. In all fairness to Corel I'll be glad to update this review if I find there is a resolution to these issues.

For about a year I was doing all my movies with Windows Live Movie Maker, a free software already installed on my computer, I guess as part of the Vista Package. Over time I really got into making sports / action movies and I thought it would be a good idea to buy a software with more advanced functions that would allow me to take my movies to the next level. To my great disappointment, this product is proving very difficult to use. It is very counter intuitive. A lot of key, basic editing functions are difficult to find and work with. More advanced editing features are very, very hard to work with. Here's some comparative remarks about this software and the free Windows Live Movie Maker.Corel: you can insert an overlay track, which is really cool. This means that you can have some footage edited into your main movie frame: think of the deaf language translation small frame at the bottom left of the main screen of your tv when a speech is given. What is also cool about Corel are the filters or special effects you can apply to your edited clips. Some will really make your clips get a professional look. Other cool stuff: you can record your voice over your clips; you can fiddle with the surround sound balance; and what is really good is that you can bring m4a files (the format of the music files you get when buying music through ITunes) straight into your soundtrack. Now, for the bad stuff. How I said earlier, the whole interface and access to key editing functions is difficult. Also, it is difficult to include titles with a black background: all your titles can only be added on your movie clips (think of the Hoarders series: between chapters, you have this black screen coming up with white letters explaining the situation - this is very, very difficult to do with this software). Adjusting the sound level of music tracks is very difficult and requires having a bunch of windows open at the same time. The transition effects between scenes leaves you very few (and lame) options. When you want to include an image, there`s no special effects available (pan and zoom, etc.) so your picture are just there in the movie, not moving, making it all look unprofessional.Windows Live Movie Maker (again, it is free): Waaaaay easier and intuitive. Organizing scene selection is much easier and less confusing especially if you have a lot of scenes to organize. Editing is not super precise, but good enough. There's loads of really good scene transitions effects and also tons of good effects to your photos if you want to include some in your movie (the pictures effects are really good because you can make a picture kind of come alive since you can add some movement in the way it comes up to the screen - in a way it becomes "still footage"). Including and manipulating sound tracks is extremely easy and efficient except it won't take m4a format, which is a huge downside, but can be overcome through changing the format of your music. Adding subtitles, titles and text in general is easy and gives you more flexibility. The biggest problem though is that the program crashes a lot if you are trying to put together a big-ish movie that includes a lot of footage sequences you need to edit. That is really a problem. Also, there's no overlay effects, but to be honest, this is not a feature you would need to use very often.Verdict: save your money. Corel is a cheap editing software but there's reasons why it is cheap. I've given up on using Corel's after countless hours of frustrating use and went back to use the free Windows Live Movie Maker.I think that if you really want to bring your movies to the next level, you should buy something that will probably cost you a whole lot more. I can't recommend one at this point, but I'll look into it over the next few months.I hope this was useful. Good luck.

well already had X2 waited a long time to get X2 ultimate.Came with an excellent package which I wasn't expecting and wasn't advertised.An illiustrator type package for drawing & a video editing bundle PLUS 2 handy instruction manuals.All fantasitc value for the price.However, I only purchased this product to acquire some additional 'picture frames' and although there are manyextra frames, most of them are NAFF, novelty picture frames of little use to the serious photographer.Think I might complain to paint shop pro. If enough people complain they might write us some decent picture frames !!