Software : Buying Guide: Best video editing software under £100 |
| Buying Guide: Best video editing software under £100 Posted: 21 May 2011 04:00 AM PDT  However much fun you have shooting video, the real satisfaction comes later, when you bring it into your editing suite and turn hours of footage into something tight, special and genuinely watchable. You can throw together something acceptable with free software like Windows Movie Maker, but with the tools you'll find over the next few pages, you can make it look truly professional. Most video editors available at this price work in a similar way. You import your clips from whatever you shot or saved them on, arrange them in a storyboard view if you like, then jump into a multi-track timeline to handle the proper editing. You can link clips together with simple transitions like wipes and fades, and jazzier ones that you're usually better off avoiding. You can apply effects over the top of your individual clips, adding things like colour correction or the inevitable lens flare. Again, feel free to use the former, but keep experiments with the latter to yourself. However, just because packages are similar doesn't mean they're the same. Almost all of these tools include a few of their own unique features, and each of them puts its own spin on the process. Whether you want as many features as you can get your hands on, or a gentle introduction to video editing, we've got the right package for you. Adobe Premiere Elements 9 - £77
Even more than its Photoshop sibling, Premiere Elements' best feature is that you don't feel like you're missing out by not having the full version. At least, not in terms of raw features. From its automatic trimming tools to the superb organiser for managing your clips and photos, Premiere Elements offers everything you need to make your movies look better. Need to fix some shaky camera footage? No problem. Powerful timeline editors? It's got them all. You don't get some of the extras that other editors are offering, like 3D, but if there's a tool that you genuinely need, Adobe Premiere Elements 9 almost certainly offers it. Unfortunately, it doesn't necessarily offer it very efficiently. This version of Premiere is surprisingly slow, and only gets slower as your projects become more ambitious. There's no CUDA support on offer, and it doesn't take much editing before the CPU strain starts to show. The strange thing is that instead of offering features to offset this, this version comes with very few new toys of interest. Being able to import from Flip cameras and DSLRs directly is certainly handy, but you'll probably never use the new feature to export finished movies to www.photoshop.com instead of YouTube, nor do much more than laugh at the deeply silly new filter that's meant to make your video look like a cartoon, but really makes it look ugly and over-posterised. The best addition is the boost to Premiere's audio options, offering extra filters devoted to cleaning up bad sound. It works fine, as long as you don't expect miracles. Elements has long been the package by which all other home video editors are judged. In terms of raw features, this is no exception. In execution though, it's hard not to feel like it's coasting a bit too much. Verdict: 3/5 Corel VideoStudio Pro X4 - £80
Corel's latest effort is a great demonstration of interface design in action. At first glance, it looks simple. In practice, all the options you need are there, sitting unobtrusively out of the way until you need them. For example, while both it and Roxio offer features to turn 2D footage into 3D, Roxio asks you to create a dedicated 3D project, and convert your files before inserting them. Corel just imports them as normal, but makes 3D an option at the export stage. It means a longer rendering time when you're done, but it gets you working on the timeline view that much faster. The basic workflow is excellent, with everything integrated onto the same screen, performance boosted by support for Cuda and Intel Core, upscaling included as standard, and - cue the sound of cheers if your PC is set up to take advantage - dual-monitor support. When the whole market is matched so closely in terms of raw functions, this is the kind of thing that can make all the difference. VideoStudio never loses sight of the fact that it's a mid-range product, but its focus on handy features like creating proxies for hefty files makes it very comfortable to use. The freedom to simply rip off a panel and have it floating free or docked wherever you want it really helps when you're settling down for an evening's serious editing. It's a particularly useful feature when you have a huge pile of media files to sort through, and having them in the same application is infinitely more convenient than them being hidden away in a separate organiser. Many of VideoStudio's effects are gimmicky, and there some disappointments like the limited number of tracks to work with, but there's little to complain about. It's an excellent package, no matter how you like to work. Verdict: 4.5/5 Nero Video Premium HD - £50
Nero proves that feel can matter just as much as sheer features in such a crowded market. It has most of the usual bases covered, and it's not that different in design from the others, but it feels much clumsier. It put a bad taste in our mouths even during the installation process by trying to install the pointless Ask.com toolbar, which is ridiculous for what's supposed to be a premium video editing package. Once we fired it up, the interface simply wasn't as pleasant to use as the other packages here. The problem isn't that it's simply Nero Multimedia Suite's video editor component per se, it's that it feels like it. Even though it is one of the cheapest editing tools in this test, at this price, we were expecting something sleeker. The same applies to the MediaHub app that comes along with it, which would be handy for file management on its own merits, but pales in comparison to others we've seen in this test - particularly Adobe's effort. In Nero's favour though, it does pack in plenty of effects to play with, especially when you factor in the bonus pack you get with the Premium HD version. That and Blu-ray support are the only differences between the two packs, and the price difference is only £10. Nero isn't the cheapest editor, but that's still a pretty good price. Just don't try to do a straight upgrade of Vision Xtra if you find that you need the feature in the future, since that will suddenly cost you a whopping £40. If there's a reason for that, we can't see it. Nero Video Premium HD is a perfectly adequate editor, but one without anything that excites or makes it stand out. It does the job, but so does all of its competition. As part of a suite, it would be - and indeed, is - perfectly fine. As the headline act though, it lacks star power. Verdict: 3/5 Serif MoviePlus X5 - £60
MoviePlus offers one of the smoothest introductions to video editing around, not simply because it's easy to use, but because it puts its instructions front and centre (or to be more exact, front and off to the left, but still very prominent). If you've never tried editing a video properly before, it's a step-by-step guide to all of the basics, and if you simply follow it, you won't go far wrong. In terms of core features, MoviePlus offers everything you'd expect, from Blu-ray burning to specific filters like image stabilisation and performance boosters like proxy-file generation for your high definition content. It doesn't bring anything radically new or different to the table though, and not all of its interface design is as helpful as the starter guide. Menus and options often feel clumsy compared to the competition, with weak media management. It's also somewhat strange that while it provides three sample projects, one of them is a snazzy but complicated demonstration of chroma keying, and the second shows how to fake tilt-shift effects. Some more samples along the lines of the third, which simply focuses on the selection of transitions and PIP effects, would seem much more in keeping with the product's overall style. The ability to move either panels or the main Preview window onto a second monitor is very handy, freeing up more space to work with the Timeline and make proper use of its support for unlimited tracks. You also get the ability to group your clips and effects, making it much easier to compartmentalise sections of your movie and work on large chunks in one fell swoop. MoviePlus might not be the most exciting editor on the market, but it remains a very capable one that handles the nuts and bolts just fine. Verdict: 3/5 Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 - £90
Compared to most of the suites on test, Vegas is a startlingly intimidating editor - at least at first glance. At this price, most interfaces are sleek, with clear options, and a wide array of wizards to guide you through the more complex features. Vegas is big, confusing, cluttered, and extremely unfriendly - even with its excellent interactive tutorials. As just one example of this, when you apply new effects, they're all controlled and stored in a pop-up window rather than being integrated comfortably into the main interface. To get away with this, a product has to pack some serious power - and while Vegas isn't as strong as it really needs to be, many of its features do exactly that. The majority that it offers are at least as good as its competition, with a few that surpass it - like the Secondary Color Corrector for fixing issues that simple tweaking and white balancing can't handle. With this, you can pick any colour in your video and shift it as much as you like - the tutorial demonstrates this by recolouring the yellow stripes in a bumblebee costume into pinks, greys and more, without affecting the other colours. Another unusually advanced option is a dedicated levels control, which lacks the graph you'd expect in an image editor, but works under the same principles. A few of the package's features let themselves down in odd ways though. The biggest disappointment is the video stabiliser effect. Technically it works, but it's far too crop-happy. When you finally learn where to find everything, you won't want for much. Vegas is powerful, and in its own way, efficient. However, unless you really need one of its unique features, or you feel like taking off the training wheels, it's hard to justify the hassle involved in using it. Verdict: 4/5 Pinnacle Studio Ultimate Collection 15 - £95
Pinnacle Studio is one of the most complete packages on test here, starting out well by offering a full sample project that lets you really see what you should be building towards. Where most simply offer tutorials and expect you to fill in the gaps, being able to see everything from chroma key to professional quality cutting in action is a great help if you're new to video editing. What really stands out is the high quality of the effects at your disposal. Montages, for instance, work like super-transitions, letting you import multiple clips into an animation (for instance, a pan over several Polaroids, or three vertical bars of clips that fade in and out, music video style) that look surprisingly good. The dedicated Effects corner offers several impressive tweaks that you can apply to your video, but by far the best is 'Looks'. This offers a range of post-production filters to make your video stand out, from the classic day-to-night effect to faking a tilt-shift and adding a dreamy look to your movie. There are a few minor irritations, including the small size of the preview window, a limited number of tracks, and the fact that while Pinnacle does offer dual-monitor support, it only stretches to letting you make the second monitor a full-screen preview. The fixed interface doesn't offer any scope for moving things around, and its media organisation tools are weak. However, nothing in this test does a better job of letting you play with the raw look and feel of your clips, making Pinnacle especially worth checking out if your video editing wish list extends to post-production. That does push the price up a bit though, because both the regular Studio 15 and Ultimate editions lack the 'Looks' plug-in and some of the other fancier filters. Verdict: 4/5 Cyberlink PowerDirector 9 Ultra64 - £80
Depending on which version you buy, PowerDirector starts out with either a very helpful performance boost or a bizarre missed opportunity. Buy the more expensive Ultra64 version and you get a specially written 64-bit version of the software, which is fast, efficient and effective. The regular Deluxe version, however, is 32-bit. There are reasons why you have to pay more for its Blu-ray support - expensive technology licenses have to be to be taken into account - but 64-bit support? If you don't burn Blu-rays, the extra £30 is a lot to swallow. It's a shame that this leaves such a sour taste in the mouth, because PowerDirector is a genuinely good tool. Along with the standard timeline editing mode, you get plenty of effects to play with, including video upsampling using the TrueTheater technology that we enjoyed so much in PowerDVD. It's best to have a clean clip to work with, and whether you're removing noise or boosting the video, it's not hard to crank it too high, but when it works, it's just what you need to make your videos look good. Finally, while not a unique feature, PowerDirector also comes with SmartSound to sort out background music for your movie if you don't have any on tap. You take a base tune, set a variation, then customise it to fit a set chunk of time. You get several pieces of music for free, with the option to buy more. All of these features are available regardless of whether you get Deluxe or Ultra64, with the only real boosts beyond the 64-bit support being the ability to handle Blu-ray discs. If you need those, the extra £30 is justifiable. If not, let's hope that Cyberlink sees sense for PowerDirector 10, makes 64-bit a standard option for everyone, and we all get a great bonus feature on top of an excellent product. Verdict: 4/5 Roxio Video Lab HD - £50
Unsurprisingly for an editor born of Roxio's Creator suites, Video Lab HD is one of the friendlier options for video editing. Fire it up and the majority of options are served up not as menus in a huge suite, but as simple options on a launcher menu. At its simplest, you don't need to worry about Roxio's dedicated editing screen at all. The software's built-in CineMagic Assistant reads in your files, slices them up into scenes and applies a theme to the ones you want to keep, including 'Party', 'Map' and 'Romance'. It's a good way to cut together a few scenes and get the flavour of a video in a minute or so without having to cut it together manually. Still, for anything remotely serious, you'll still be working with the standard storyboard and timeline views for most of the time. Both of these features work exactly as you'd expect, with a solid range of standard effects like basic fills, and a few more gimmicky ones like coin flip transitions and clouds. VideoLab's big selling feature though is that it can convert your footage into 3D - or import it directly, if you recorded it with a dedicated 3D camera. You'll find a pair of red/cyan analgyph glasses included with the pack for watching 3D video on your monitor, and you can also export the results in 'RealD' format for TVs. Importing 2D footage for conversion takes quite a while, but the result is reasonably effective - given the right clips, of course. Beyond these, all the other video editing features you'd expect are here, including Blu-ray authoring, footage stabilisation, easy importing of clips and handy tools for fixing footage. It's a very solid suite whether or not you're into its flashy 3D features, though they're what sets it apart from most of the other suits on test. Verdict: 4/5 You can't go too badly wrong here. These tools are almost all feature-packed, and while some perform better than others, they'll only grind slowly if you go crazy trying to get your money's worth out of features like 'unlimited' tracks or dozens of effects. We're reviewing specific versions here, but it's worth remembering that most of these tools are also available in at least one other version that costs less and lacks Blu-ray support (and usually a handful of bonus features that you're unlikely to miss, although check the details on their websites to make sure). If you don't have a Blu-ray burner and don't plan to upgrade soon, that's an easy saving before you start shopping around for cheaper deals. Editors Choice: Corel VideoStudio Pro X4 It's a close contest, and the main reason we've chosen Corel is its interface and ease of use rather than its feature set (for that, Pinnacle Studio takes the crown, if you're willing to swallow the extra cost of the Ultimate Collection). This was by far the most comfortable editor to use whatever your level of experience. Given how long editing takes, that means a lot. Value Award: Roxio Video Lab HD Not only is it one of the cheaper options, it comes with one of the year's most exciting new features - support for 3D. If you don't care about that, ignore those options entirely and enjoy a powerful, flexible editing suite that doesn't cost the Earth. If you do, break out your glasses or expensive TV and prepare to put your footage into a brand new dimension. |
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