When Corel purchased Ulead, the initial release of VideoStudio under the new ownership seemed like business as usual. VideoStudio 11 Plus retained the Ulead branding, and the interface updates were evolutionary.

Now, Corel has dropped the Ulead name, and instead of version 12 we get X2 Pro. The interface hasn’t had as radical a treatment as the name, but there are plenty of new features.

As with the past few versions of VideoStudio, and in parallel with Pinnacle’s strategy, there are two editions of X2. Unlike the Pinnacle equivalent, however, both offer HD video support from capture to output.

The difference between the Pro Ultimate and the standard Pro editions is the software bundle. With the basic incarnation, you get a copy of the WinDVD 8 Silver video-player software in the box alongside the editing app.

But with Ultimate, the bundle includes the 9 Plus Blu-ray version of WinDVD, as well as Steinberg WaveLab LE 6 Audio Editor and DVD Copy 6 Plus – all for just an extra $44.

The application itself has more enhancements than it has major new features. You can now place transitions on superimposition tracks, rather than simply on the main track – between picture-in-picture clips, for example.

It’s an ability Adobe Premiere Elements has had since the beginning and is a welcome addition, although Corel’s software still only offers a maximum of six video overlay tracks.

VideoStudio also continues to make a distinction between video and title tracks, but you can now add two of the latter, allowing you to blend different animated text elements.

Entirely new is the Painting Creator tool – a unique feature in software at this price point and lots of fun, too. It provides an array of simple painting and drawing tools, such as paintbrush, airbrush, crayon and charcoal.

Hit the Record button, and your drawing is recorded as a macro that you can play back and tweak. When you’re happy with the results, these are rendered to a file that’s then added to the Video Media library, and can be dragged onto the timeline.

You can’t edit and re-render these finished animations, but your macros are automatically saved to the Painting Creator library, so you can load the tool again, recall them, make additions or change the duration, and re-render.

The other new features are less earth-shattering, but still welcome. The Auto Pan & Zoom adds motion to still images automatically, making slideshows more visually interesting without any effort; simply right-click on an image and choose the option, or select multiple clips and apply to all of them at once.

Fifteen more animated Flash overlays, plus 20 new object and frame overlay graphics, are now included.

Five film-look preset effects from NewBlue have also been added, producing more interesting results than the generic Old Film filter offered previously, and there’s more if you delve into the custom options.

The semi-automatic Movie wizard has broadened its selection of templates, and overlapping clips on the same track now automatically adds the default transition between them.

Performance in this version is allegedly enhanced for Intel quad-core processors. Our test system had a Core 2 Extreme QX9650, 4GB of RAM and a RAID disk array, but VideoStudio X2 Pro still felt pretty sluggish with Full HD AVCHD footage shot on a Canon HF100 camcorder.

Playing two tracks of AVCHD was impossible. Fortunately, enabling Corel’s Smart Proxy system was effective at producing lower-resolution files to work with during editing.

Output options have scarcely changed, as they were already comprehensive in the previous version. HD DVD is no longer available and the Neptune service has been removed from the online sharing selection.

But YouTube support has been improved. Instead of having to render a WMV file for upload, you can now output a fully compatible 320 x 240 FLV, with the wizard guiding you through the upload process once rendering is complete.

With strong new versions of Pinnacle Studio and Adobe Premiere Elements recently released, Corel needed a potent response. VideoStudio X2 Pro isn’t a huge change from its predecessor, but it makes some useful improvements, with Painting Creator an exciting addition.

For existing users, it’s worth the upgrade. However, Adobe’s Premiere Elements 7 offers more editing power for around the same price, even if it’s a little more complicated for new users.