VideoStudio 2018 - Is it worth the 64$ upgrade price

[Desertsweeper]

Ok so I am being offered "VideoStudio 2018 Ultimate" upgrade for $63.99 and in the past I always just upgraded. But this time - I am suspicious. You see I don't really want any new features...I just want the one's that are there to actually work. I want it to be stable and not crash out. I want it to actually render files every time I ask it to. You know - work properly...
Anyone downloaded and tried it yet - any first comments?

[AlaskanDruid]

I created an account specifically for this thread. Ive been with VS since X6, and upgrading on every offer. But ... I just got the 2018 upgrade offer. Anyone haven news on this? It looks like this replaced the X11 thread.

[Scubbie]

As with anything it comes down to personal choice. I haveRoxio Creator NXT Pro 4 and have no intention to upgrade to Pro 6 (current version) as Pro 4 does what I need of the software.

However there are some features which I am looking forward to utilising in VS 2018. The Split Screen Video is definitely on the list. Correcting any lens distortion is useful for some of the footage I get, but not all. The current tool isn't very useful. A better version exists within Corel PaintShop Pro. Hopefully they've taken a similar approach.

Improving the rendering process is always appreciated. Some of what I've been doing this past year kept my poor laptop busy for a few hours, just to produce something that played back in around a minute. It was worth it though .

I'm hopeful that other improvements have been made too.


***happy bunny***

[Desertsweeper]

OK I went ahead and bought it, after-all it's not exactly in the league of Vegas et-al at 500$ and upwards. Busy downloading - will throw some of the things at it that VS X10 failed on and see how it goes...and the first thing will be ProDAD Mercalli on multiple clips - a total dismal failure on the last version.
5.4GB to download, of which one file is 666.6MB...hope that's not a sign of things to come...
And there is already a Service-Pack 1 downloaded and applied...thats an hour after it was released!

[AlaskanDruid]

Please keep us updated on your progress. Especially rendering times.

I am very interested in hearing the results.

[Desertsweeper]

Well it took about two minutes to open the new program on my super-fast pc. And all my folders are gone - reset back to the original"Samples" ScoreMusic etc. Visually pretty much identical at first blush...just a new-blue'ish skin to the same old layout which for me is a good thing.
Am not seeing any render improvement time-wise but that is subjective and not timed - using the same Full-HD 30FPS file I was working on this morning - seems about the same or maybe even a little slower. I an using an Nvidia Quadro P1000 and they may have gone the Intel HWA route in which case I am game-over with Corel render times....yes it's definitely sloooooower. I will do some comparative benchmarks tomorrow as it is late now and I am riding the dunes at the crack of dawn. WIll time X10 to 2018 and report back. WIll also do the Mercalli test and see how that goes

Quick Update: I closed it and tried to open it again but it refused. Discovered hung process in Task Manager. Killed that and tried again and then it opened - super fast this time. Guess it was doing an initial refresh the first time. I notice during render that is uses all 12 of my hyper-threaded cores - but never more than 60%. Bounces around between 40 and 60% but never saturates the cores like Movie Edit Pro does for example.

[AlaskanDruid]

Thank you VERY much for your updates so far.

I am currently using an i5 machine, but I am upgrading to a custom built threadripper (1950x) soon. Mainly due to the ton of streaming, and video editing I do. I'm evaluating all sorts of video editing software now that will make use of GTX video cards and AMD encoding features. I've have found that most software will only use Intel's encoding ... which is ... bad, to say the least.

Thank you again for your help!

[Desertsweeper]

Yes - I am in the process of buying a new system based around an Intel GPU using the Core i7-8700K specifically because everyone seems to be moving to Intel GPU acceleration. Magix is going that way it seems and now possibly Corel. I have just rendered a few clips I am familiar with and I am now certain that the new VS2018 is slower for me on an Nvidia platform. They boast of faster performance...not seeing it at all...

[Scubbie]

@Desertsweeper: I learnt some time back to save the current Library prior to installing a new version. Once you have the new version you can normally import the old library. As you still have X10 installed, you can still do this.

[Ken Berry]

No version of VS has ever automatically incorporated the library folders of previous versions. They are totally independent installations, so you need to export any previous version library you want and import it into the later version.

[Desertsweeper]

@Desertsweeper: I learnt some time back to save the current Library prior to installing a new version. Once you have the new version you can normally import the old library. As you still have X10 installed, you can still do this.

Awesome tip - thanks will do exactly that!

[Desertsweeper]

OK last update for today: Identical clip rendered at same settings (Mp4) to same location:
VS X10 @ 7m29s
VS 2018 @ 5m06s
So I was totally wrong...it is significantly faster!!

[Ken Berry]

That's encouraging.

[RobertOZ]

You may find that launching VS 2018 can take an extraordinary length of time, due to Triple Scoop and Muserk requiring internet access before the program loads, so if you do not require those 2 folders, hide them (that does seem to be working correctly now) and launching is much faster

[AlaskanDruid]

Wait... did you just said that this basically offline software (there's absolutely no reason for it to use the internet/network for any reason at all), requires an -always connected- machine in order to actually run?