Severe performance issues on trial of Videostudio 2018

[guyfromthenorth]

I am desperately trying to find a decent video editor for my youtube videos. I've been borrowing time on a friends Mac but it's time for me to take this in house so to speak.

I like the layout of Videostudio 2018 (the current free trial version) but for the life of me it runs TERRIBLE. If I put more than a clip or two, or any titles, into the timeline and his play on ANYTHING (clips in my preview box or full screen, from the time line or not from the time line) they get garbled, artifacts, frame rate jumps, but the audio is fine. I also randomly get MASSIVE lag-outs. For example I will click on a video clip in my top right hand box (where the thumbnails are for clips to add) and play it, it may run fine, then I click the next clip over to look at it and the ENTIRE PROGRAM FREEZES for 1-2 mins (I've timed it). If I tab out of Videostudio during this time my computer runs fine, I can open Chrome windows for example and browse the web with no issues. During these "lag outs" I open the task manager and it shows the Corel process at 0.2% CPU, and 22mb of RAM used, also 0 disk useage. What the heck? It's frozen...but not doing anything??

I've turned on hardware acceleration in the program. No change. I don't understand why this runs so terrible, and I was all set to pay for the full copy but not in such a broken state. Any ideas?? Here's some info:

Video Clips:
-All 30FPS 1080p GoPro Here 4 SIlver, loaded onto my hard drive.
-Clips are less than 30sec a piece, nothing major here.

System:
-WIn10 64bit, fully updated.
-Asus ROG laptop, no heat issues, plugged into power
-Intel Core I7 2.50ghz
-16gb Ram
-GeFORCE GTX 860m video card
-500gb magnetic HDD

I know video editing can be hard on systems, but my laptop isn't even warm feeling, the task manager reports virtually NO effort on any level, why is this program running like junk?

[Davidk]

Several points about your situation here.
1. the trial version has been severely restricted in it's functions for several years. For example, any item (eg, an audio codec) that's licensable is not in it any more.
2. Corel software doesn't use multiple cores in the processor. Why, no one knows. But for performance improvements, this would be the way to go. So, if you have influence with the video studio development manager, use it.
3. Hardware acceleration in the program requires - altho it doesn't say it in the doco - a display adapter with it's own cpu, gpu and RAM that can be used to assist the main processor. Thus, an nvidia display adapter, and reasonably modern one at that: nvidia admit their latest CUDA (search wikipedia) software is not backwards compatible to all models of adapter (about 282+ on last count)
4. If your clips are HD resolution - eg, mp4 - try turning on smart proxy in the settings\ preferences\performance tab. This creates a DVD alias of any timeline clip that is used for editing, but can take a minute or 2 to do that. This avoids jerky performance when the program is trying to manage HD images on a per frame basis. Any edits applied to the project file are applied to the related HD clip when rendering the result.

But mostly, if you like the interface but wonder about performance, buy the software and use it. If not happy within 30 days, get a refund from Corel and make very sure they know why you want it.