Think of VideoStudio as being a program consisting of two halves.
First half is the editing side of things.
This resembles the appearance of previous versions of VideoStudio and so it was easy to work out how to do things.
Trim clips, add titles, add overlay tracks, sound effects and so on.
No problem here and in fact there are lots of extra goodies that make the video editing experience all that more interesting.
Second half is the authoring side of things.
This bears no resemblance whatsoever to what we have all become accustomed to in the past, it is a complete face lift and as a result we all end up groping in the dark.
It does not work the way you would expect and so this is what has been causing such confusion. Happily there now is an online help "manual"
Click here to view.
The thing that caused me the most confusion and what made the program so difficult to use is getting stuff into the authoring stage. With Existing versions stuff on your computers hard drive is imported via Windows File Manager
Where you simply navigate to whatever it is that you want, music, photographs, videos.
This has changed with VSX3 / Factory 2010.
Instead you have a "Media Organizer"
You must firstly import your videos, photographs and music into the Media Organiser. There are various ways to do this dependant upon the source of the material. Separate import buttons exist for importing from a camcorder, importing from a DVD, WebCam, your mobile phone etc.
Once you have mastered the art of getting this material into the "Media Manager" you are now ready to do things with it. Previous versions of VideoStudio assumed that you wanted to create a DVD - be it a standard definition, Blue Ray or AVCHD. - You were going to place something on a circular shiny thing with a hole in the middle!
This has changed with VSX3 where you can do all of the above, but in addition you can do other things such as print photographs, upload stuff to YouTube. Send videos, photographs to your mobile phone, send things via email and lots more.
Having managed to get your material into the Media Manager, you then create a new project. This project can be any one of the above options - lets say for instance we are going to create a DVD. You create a project for it.
What you now do is to drag down anything that you want to use in that project to the Media Tray. Although different in appearance this is something that exists in MediaStudio. The big difference though is that with MediaStudio you did not also have a Media Manager - you simply placed things into the Media Tray directly from Windows File Manager.
It perhaps takes a while to grasp this new concept and is one of the main problems we have faced with the new software. Hopefully this brief explanation will alleviate some of the problems most of us have been having. I have of course mentioned to Corel that the present system could be made a lot easier if we could simply right click the Media Tray and then import things directly via Windows File Manager.
