I apologize for my ignorance around this software. I decided to do more research.
Turns out the company behind it, Corel, actually still exists and the www.corel.com domain listed on the box is still active and owned by them. Additionally, they're the current owners of WordPerfect - I imagine that'll ring a bell for many of you.

Decided to put the link into the wayback machine, and it turns out there are a couple of snapshots from 1996, but not many. While it's possible I didn't look deep enough, I wasn't able to see a specific mention of this software on the site. I was able to see other software such as Corel PhotoDraw, and the aforementioned WordPerfect, but not much else beyond that.

Given this seems like a pretty reputable company, this gives me at least some confidence in saying that this software was mass produced to at least some extent.

Here's the wayback link if you'd like to do your own investigation: https://web.archive.org/web/19960615000000*/www.corel.com

Interesting, never heard of it before either but here you go:
https://web.archive.org/web/19970726221746/ht … miere/index.htm

Found a review in English here:
https://www.kaisernet.org/library/1997/0501/winla143.htm

And one in Italian at https://archive.org/details/MC_microcomputer- … e/n233/mode/1up

Made for the home market, unlike Adobe Premiere.
And at the time, around the mid 90s, other products existed, Creative Labs made a video capture card with an editing software for example.

So, I know for a fact that there were some capture cards being sold in new PCs by 1997. I had an ATI AIW, and I think the Avermedia card I still have is from about then. There were commercially boxed capture cards, which weren't too expensive, so you could imagine already easily obtainable to support the add on when the PC did not come with one. These cards usually were bundled with free trials of video editing software. I can't remember the software, but it was popular at the time. I believe cards had been available for some time before then, even if they were quite limited or expensive depending on the target audience. It might be possible that hardware encoding was also used in conjunction already, but I think this would have made this all more expensive. So the earliest cards for consumers were quite limited, because of silicon/cost/cpu limitations of the time. The best experience would have been probably to buy a good capture/editor that worked with your card, and have the fastest CPU, Pentium 2+.

Eventually USB capture devices took over the low end market when USB was popular enough. When digital recording and SD/CF became popular, it pretty much killed the need for these.

It's no surprise that really that Corel would have tried the venture, and fail here. They failed at several things. There was competition already, good options at that, well before Microsoft and Apple jumped into it for the home user.

Just checking old magazines, Ulead Studio was often bundled with capture cards or a light version of Premiere.

Dude, of course Corel is still rocking. And I'm an active customer of their software suite since CorelDRAW 3 and until now. Corel PhotoPaint is thankfully a good alternative to crazy Adobe's Photoshop, and CorelDRAW has always been (and still is, IMO) a better program for illustration and 2D design than Adobe Illustrator or InkScape.

That being said, it only shames me more that I don't remember Lumiere at all. The name rings a bell, but I always knew CorelSHOW. So yes... when you run out of patience and decide to open the box, please archive the CD! Perhaps even document the unboxing on YT 🙂 Corel had great manuals in their early products.

lolo799 wrote on 2024-07-11, 16:36:

Interesting, never heard of it before either but here you go: https://web.archive.org/web/19970726221746/ht … miere/index.htm […]
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Interesting, never heard of it before either but here you go:
https://web.archive.org/web/19970726221746/ht … miere/index.htm

Found a review in English here:
https://www.kaisernet.org/library/1997/0501/winla143.htm

And one in Italian at https://archive.org/details/MC_microcomputer- … e/n233/mode/1up

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Made for the home market, unlike Adobe Premiere.
And at the time, around the mid 90s, other products existed, Creative Labs made a video capture card with an editing software for example.

Thank you very much for finding this. I'll definitely take a look through here.

wbahnassi wrote on 2024-07-11, 17:53:

Dude, of course Corel is still rocking. And I'm an active customer of their software suite since CorelDRAW 3 and until now. Corel PhotoPaint is thankfully a good alternative to crazy Adobe's Photoshop, and CorelDRAW has always been (and still is, IMO) a better program for illustration and 2D design than Adobe Illustrator or InkScape.

That being said, it only shames me more that I don't remember Lumiere at all. The name rings a bell, but I always knew CorelSHOW. So yes... when you run out of patience and decide to open the box, please archive the CD! Perhaps even document the unboxing on YT 🙂 Corel had great manuals in their early products.

I appreciate the insight, as I've never personally known anyone that uses or has used Corel products in the past. I'll definitely unbox this soon; I'm sure it'd be the perfect piece of software to try on my NT Workstation and will make for an interesting video.

the3dfxdude wrote on 2024-07-11, 17:03:

Eventually USB capture devices took over the low end market when USB was popular enough. When digital recording and SD/CF became popular, it pretty much killed the need for these.

It's no surprise that really that Corel would have tried the venture, and fail here. They failed at several things. There was competition already, good options at that, well before Microsoft and Apple jumped into it for the home user.

Yeah, this topic got me to research some of their other past endeavors. This certainly wasn't the first or last time they released something that didn't really go anywhere. Given the fact that practically everyone I've talked to hasn't heard of it tells you everything you need to know...

One of my colleagues back at an old job was an employee at Corel. He was a sound programmer at Corel during the early 2000's. But again my memory fails me on remembering what software he was working on at Corel.