Wake up Corel

[m rixon]

Adobe Premiere Elements 7 and 8 are causing lots of problems with crashing according to their forum pages. Also "Computer Shoppper" magazine does not think much of PE8 according to their recent review.

Is this not a great opportunity for Corel to do something for us Mediastudio addicts to make it work on Windows 7 ?
Please don't suggest Videostudio, it is just not as good.

[sjj1805]

We know how you feel and agree with you, however the last time Ron, Ken and myself tried to discuss with a representative from Corel, things like
MediaStudio pro, DVD Workshop, PhotoImpact, Gif Animator and several other former Ulead programs, we were bluntly told to keep our noses out of their "Business decisions."

[Gorf]

It's too late, anyway. As well as rewriting to accommodate Win7, they'd also have to start a new marketing campaign to rekindle interest in MSP. Existing customers who needed MSP's functionality on a regular basis have already moved to competing products. I'd guess that the only ones with those needs still using MSP are people like me, who only edit one or two films per year...

[skyml]

It's too late, anyway. As well as rewriting to accommodate Win7, they'd also have to start a new marketing campaign to rekindle interest in MSP. Existing customers who needed MSP's functionality on a regular basis have already moved to competing products. I'd guess that the only ones with those needs still using MSP are people like me, who only edit one or two films per year...

Find it odd how the # of films one edits per year matters as well as the # of loyal customers that Corel stupidly lost in all this. There is a whole slew of new and aspiring editors who are out there and many are feeling the pain of the limits of Videostudio and offering an update to MSP(9) is a great business idea. Too late????? never. Tie the marketing into Videstudio. I moved on to Sony Vegas Pro 9 and have Adobe Premier CS5 with After effects and VS X4 but would move back to MSP in a heartbeat if they brought it back and up-to-date. Am sure others feel the same way.

[msp7fan]

Find it odd how the # of films one edits per year matters as well as the # of loyal customers that Corel stupidly lost in all this. There is a whole slew of new and aspiring editors who are out there and many are feeling the pain of the limits of Videostudio and offering an update to MSP(9) is a great business idea. Too late????? never. Tie the marketing into Videstudio. I moved on to Sony Vegas Pro 9 and have Adobe Premier CS5 with After effects and VS X4 but would move back to MSP in a heartbeat if they brought it back and up-to-date. Am sure others feel the same way.

You're completely right. I would prefer an actual MediaStudio instead of Videostudio.

But the "marketing fuzzies" made their decision, that the product is only for standard consumers below the 90 Dollar / Euro limit - and maybe really within that range is the great volume of sales in millions of boxes instead of some ten thousands for a better price.

Don't know how much sales Adobe, Grass Valley, Sony (and others) with their prosumer and high end level products can realize.

[skyml]

See, that's a point I still don't get. They Own MSP... they have the code and all the development from VS to make MSP up-to-date. If they don't "F" with MSP too much by making changes that effect what it is and how it works then they already own a product that beats the existing compitition. Why let it sit on a dusty shelf? MSP won't take from their current existing sales of VSP and will only add sales to a product people want and they own. Sitting on if makes no sense and the cost's of updating it to work with current OS can't be so high that it would hurt profit from it's own sales. Sales and profits from VSP are sales and profits from VSP - MSP is in it's own market and sales from that sure beat no sales at all. That's how I see it.

I get so frustrated when I use VSP remembering that working with key frames - MSP did it better, making slow motion - MSP was more powerful and did it better, working with masks - MSP does it better, working in the time-line - MSP did it better, nested time-line - MSP only does this, working in story board mode - VSP actully is nice here, I'd add Story board mode to MSP.

[Gorf]

...But the "marketing fuzzies" made their decision...

Sorry bud - you're wrong there. It's my fault that MSP was canned.

I got into MSP at version 6 a decade ago, when it came bundled with a Pyro firewire card. I bought version 7, and was gifted version 8 by someone at Ulead when I said several times on a forum (not this one) that the new features in MSP8 weren't enough for me to justify the cost of the update.

So there you have it - three versions of the software, only really paid for one. Multiply that by enough people and you see why Corel have arrived at the same decision about paying developers to make MSP9 as I made about paying Ulead for MSP8.

Don't come back with a "how hard can it be?" post on the basis that they already have the source code. There are many open source video editors out there. If it wasn't hard, you could just grab some source code and develop what you want by yourself.

Don't bleat about "I bought MSP6, 7 and 8" either. Even if you did, there aren't enough similarly-minded people to cover the cost of development, testing, marketing, replication and support while still turning in a worthwhile profit.

It's nothing to do with "marketing fuzzies" - the product strategists make decisions about which ones to keep and develop, and that's based on sales and costs. That data comes from you and me, so it's our fault.

Very occasionally, a product may be binned because of internal competition with another product, but I don't think that has happened here. Your best bet for rekindling Corel's interest in MSP is that it could be sold as a loss leader to eat into the market share of Sony, Adobe et al. Don't expect too much, though: If it were my business, I wouldn't bother.

[Coral]

My solution to keep using all my favourite software including UMSP7, is not to upgrade to Win7. To start, I don't like Win7 at all. Most of the tweaking that could be done on WinXP are not possible on Win7. I have tried to "tollerate" the changes from WinXP to Win7 but I stood to be losing more than gaining. So I just opted to keep WinXP and keep using all my software.

[Ken Berry]

That's fine if at the same time you decide to stick with standard definition video, but unfortunately the world is moving on from that. So MSP will become increasingly not useful for an increasing number of users... That is not a criticism of you, your practices, XP and least of all, of MSP which remains a great program. But it is unfortunately also a statement of reality...

[Coral]

Ken, I fully agree with you. What I mean, is that with WinXP I can still use my old software and when It comes to formats that MSP can't handle I still can use other recent software. The time line on MSP, in my opinion, is fantastic. I have just bought the Pinnacle Studio MiovieBoard HD which has Studio 14 HD bundled with it. I must admit the S14 and S15 have some nice features and quite easy to use, but I probably shall not use it unless I move to a larger format than standard DVD.