Results: Here is my data. I've highlighted the winner in each category with a green square.
| Task |
Pinnacle Studio 11
|
Sony Vegas
Movie Studio 9
|
Adobe Premier Elements 7
|
| Startup |
~45 Seconds
|
~30 seconds
|
~30 seconds
|
| Load some video files |
MP4, MPG, AVI supported
Dragging directly to video track supported
Internal Scene detection
|
MP4, MPG, AVI supported
|
MP4, MPG, AVI supported
|
| Navigate video tracks, do some simple cutting |
Only two video tracks
Scene cuts are intuitive
|
Deleteing scenes is a little different than Pinnacle, but easier to control
Cursor movement is also differnant easier to control
|
Deleting scenese is intuitive.
No mouse wheel zooming :(
Cutting function is a little hard to find.
|
| Add a transition between video clips |
Drag in a transtion from the transition library
|
Same as pinnacle, but fade transition are a 1st class citizen in the UI and are very easy to implement.
|
Same as pinnacle, drag in from a library.
Library has nice search capabilities
|
| Add a bunch of pictures for a photo montage, insert transitions, add some music, add pan and scan effects |
Has some nice automatic montage features
Transitions have to be added one at a time
|
Select all pictures and drag in a transition to apply to all. Easy!
Pan and Scan is simple to configure and extremely powerful
|
Could not find a way to apply a transition to more than one clip at a time.
Adding a pan and zoom effect was very non-intuitive, and hard to customize.
|
| Create a stop motion video from individual frames |
Change the default image length
|
Same as pinnacle
|
Tried to change the default image length, but that did not work.
Stop frame animation is supported as part of the software
|
| Add text overlay |
Separate text overlay track and a somewhat clunky text editor. Powerful customizations
|
Very easy to do with the media generator. Easy to control as well
|
Only way I could figure out was using "Titles" in the edit tab. The title has to be modified by hand to get plain text. Very clunky!
|
| Picture in picture |
Special effect. A little clunky and hard to control
|
1st class citizen in the UI. Uses Keyframes and is extremely powerful and fairly simple.
|
A little tricky to apply (I could not find a menu-way to do this) and appears to be limited to media that is dragged in from disk. I could not figure out how to do picture-in-picture from another video track.
|
| Fade between sound tracks |
Sound envelopes are a first class feature and easy to understand, however they are very buggy.
|
Limited to fade in/fade out controls. Overal envelop control accomplish by cutting scenes
|
Limited to fade in/fade out controls. Overal envelop control accomplish by cutting scenes
|
| Create a DVD Menu with animated thumbnails |
DVD menu feature is integrated with the application and shows up in the video stream. This can be somewhat nonintuitive, but it is mostly straightforward to control.
|
Buring a DVD requires separate (included) software. The model is menu based. It took me a little while to figure out, but I liked it WAY better than both Pinnacle and Adobe when I did.
There did not seem to be an easy way to cut a background video to the desired menu time length. I think this has to be done externally
|
Integrated with the video editing package.
Very difficult to tell where the menu markers go.
Demo had very limited menu customization features
Overall a little clunky to customize menus
|
| OVERALL |
Simple to use, not as powerful as the others, lots and lots and lots of bugs. |
A delight to use! It was pretty easy to figure out and I found myself feeling eager to get back to my family movie projects after using this software. |
Has some great features, but the UI is very clunky and I felt tired of using it. I almost didn't finish the review because it was so unpleasant to figure out how to do things. |
