Geek Girls
★ Guide ★

Hi, we're the Geek Girls and we're Macs. But, hey -- we know that 90% of the rest of the world are PCs and we love all our friends, regardless of platform. We recently received a copy of Corel Digital Studio to review (and a copy to give away!) so we dusted off our PC and checked it out for you.

Interface

This little suite ended up surprising us a quite a bit! At first glance (and during installation), it seemed a bit overwhelming, but once you really get into the program it becomes easy to use and navigate. 

Features

Digital Studio includes a photo editor, video editor, burning element, and media player, all of which are easily accessed via a Desktop Widget. The widget proves to be very helpful when working on projects requiring all of those features, or just a little bit of a lot of functionality.

Photos

Grabbing and editing photos with Corel Digital Studio is surprisingly easy. You have the ability to import from a variety of sources including your computer, camera, mobile phone, webcam, scanner, and other devices (like an external hard drive).

 Once your photos have been imported, you can create albums and projects like a photobook, a greeting card, a crafty collage, a handy calendar, a family slideshow, or a backup disc. Finally, you can share your photo projects via email, Facebook, Flickr, or YouTube right from the interface.

We liked the templates that allowed us to quickly and easily make a family album or fun and totally personalized greeting card.  With Valentine's Day right around the corner - Corel Digital Studio is a great way to give your loved ones what they really want - something thoughtful and from the heart.

Video:

Your videos work much the same way.  Just like photos, you can import video from a variety of sources including, your computer, a video disc, camera, mobile phone, webcam, TV tuner/capture card, a tape-camcorder, internal memory-camcorder, or other (like an external drive). 

Once you import a video, you've started your video project. It's easy getting started with the pre-existing video backgrounds and themes.  We used one to make the test video below. After you create your movie you can export it into a number of file types, all of which come with a great description of the best place to put the files when you're done (if you're not file savvy this is a very helpful piece of information). 

Once you have your file saved you can share share it in a variety of ways, put it on YouTube, send via email, save it on your local drive, drop it on Facebook or Flickr (it's not just for photos anymore). The one function during the save/share process that we weren't so enamored with was selecting where to save your file. The user experience around this feature was just a little awkward.  But we managed.

Summary

For the most part we were impressed with Corel Digital Studio.  Mostly because it is perfect for our audience.  The interface is intuitive and easily navigable by folks who don't spend their whole lives playing with video. If you're looking to add a lot of special effects, or you have really specific editing requirements this little program might be too simple for you. But if you want to jump right in and start using your photos and videos in new and creative ways and share them with friends and family then Corel Digital Studio is for you!

Giveaway

The nice people at Corel gave us a spare copy that we can give away. Drop us a line in the comments and tell us why you should get it and we'll pick a winner using Random.org.  And because we want you to feel the love, the cut off for the drawing is Valentine's Day (02/14/10) at noon CST.  So comment now and comment often.

Here's a sample video we created in just minutes:

UPDATE: 

Contest is over and #6 is our winner.  Jon - send us an email to claim your prize.