The application will scan "watched" folders for usable assets--video, audio, etc. It is set to scan commonly used folders such as My Videos by default. Unfortunately, soon after I installed Studio 16 Ultimate, it began crashing every time I started it up. I figured out that the application was crashing every time it tried to scan an old .mov file on my system. The file is apparently damaged, because it won't play in QuickTime or any other application; when I tried to import the file into Adobe Premiere Elements 10, that application refused to import the file, citing a missing codec. But refusing to import is a far better outcome that repeated crashing--would one of the novice users that Studio is aimed at know to move the file out of the watched folder, and to suspend asset scanning, as I did? Probably not. True, mangled old video files are probably rare, and other than this incident, Studio performed adequately.

Studio 16 Ultimate competes with Premiere Elements, Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD, among many others, and Corel's own VideoStudio Pro (which Corel acquired when it bought InterVideo in 2006; InterVideo had acquired it from Ulead Systems). All of these consumer-focused applications seem to add the same new features, eventually--direct-to-YouTube uploads, a while back, and then direct-to-Facebook uploads. Studio 16 had trouble figuring out how to deal with Facebook's Login Approval security feature, so I had to authorize the application via a Web browser.

But Studio 16 Ultimate is first out of the gate with a couple of new features. It adds 3D video editing, which Movie Studio HD Platimum 11 added about a year ago, and others have followed suit, but Studio 16 supports stereoscopic 3D editing with , which Corel says allows you to edit and preview 3D projects full-screen. However, you will need several pieces of equipment, including an nVidia 3D Vision Kit, a 3D Vision-ready monitor, a compatible nVidia GeForce graphics card, and a powerful PC with Windows 7 or Windows Vista. I did not have all of these pieces, so I couldn't test the feature.

Corel released an $8 , which offers high-definition video editing on that device (Pinnacle's former owner, Avid, offered the app first, and that version is still available; it costs $5). The Pinnacle Studio app can be used independently, or you can export projects from it to a desktop version of Studio 16. Corel does not offer an Android version.