But is this actually Studio 16? Not exactly; it's really version 2 of Avid Studio, a slightly higher-end application that Avid introduced last year. I even found "Avid" references in several places throughout the application. It looks significantly different from last year's , though it still has lots of help tools and tooltips, and Corel includes 2 hours of video instruction on the DVD it comes on.
The application comes in three different versions: Studio 16, which costs $60 and allows you to add up to three video and three audio tracks; Studio 16 Plus, which costs $100 and allows up to 12 video and 12 audio tracks; and Studio 16 Ultimate, which allows you to add an unlimited number of tracks. The least-expensive version lacks support for Blu-ray disc authoring, 3D file importing, Dolby 5.1-channel audio, and keyframing; the middle version omits the Red Giant Filmmaker's Toolkit and Motion Graphics toolkit and the green-screen background sheet (to aid in "keying," or knocking out the background in a composition). That you can add as many tracks as you like and use keyframing, which is awkward at best in Studio 16 Ultimate, doesn't make even that version suitable for professional video editing; rather, they merely make it obvious that the least-expensive version is artificially hobbled.
That's not to say that Studio 16 Ultimate doesn't have some features worth considering. The most interesting feature that caught my attention is GPU acceleration, which Adobe Systems has used to great effect in its far-more-expensive Premiere Pro CS6 video editor: With a supported graphics card, Premiere can cut rendering times substantially, so seeing the same sort of technology in Studio 16 is head-turning.
In my tests, though, I did not see a performance improvement. I assembled a Studio project using multiple high-definition video tracks, audio tracks, and only transitions and effects that Studio identified as being GPU-accelerated. I then output the project to a few different file formats, with the application's GPU acceleration feature turned on and then turned off, and in every case, the project required the same amount of time to complete. From an examination of Windows' Task Manager during the operation, my computer's CPUs, rather than its graphics card, were working very hard on the job. Corel also claims that Studio 16 Ultimate has Intel Quick Sync Video optimization, a hardware-acceleration feature offered by some Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge CPUs; I could not test that claim with my system, however. Corel also claims that Studio 16 has "64-bit optimizations," though the application remains a 32-bit one.