Eggplant

ver since I've edited video, I've used Pinnacle Studio. Using our ultra-fast 400MHz PC, Pinnacle and I produced my first "funny" video. (As with all of my "funny videos", it wasn't funny.) Over the years, I eventually bought a Pinnacle upgrade here and there, but I got downright disgusted with Pinnacle Studio. The program is less stable than Windows, and every $100 upgrade seems to degrade performance while adding nothing.

I recently edited the footage from a wedding and was dreading the long hours I'd be cutting clips from multiple cameras. I had heard good reports of Sony Vegas and decided to give it a go -- perhaps Sony had some kind of multi-camera editing tool. I downloaded the 30-day trial. WOW! Talk about easy! The program out-performed anything Pinnacle could do, it was stable, it was easy to use, and the list grew and grew the more I used it. I liked it so much I started thinking about buying it. The $400 price tag was a little too much for me, so I downloaded Sony Vegas Movie Studio, the $100 "lite" edition of Vegas Pro. As it turned out, the interface is identical between the editions. Sure, Movie Studio doesn't have as many features, but after comparing the differences, I found I really didn't need the features for the kinds of things I do. I eventually bought Movie Studio with only 7 days of trial to spare.

I installed it yesterday and played around with it a bit tonight:

As one review put it, Sony Vegas is the best NLE on the market and for some strange reason, the cheapest.

(And, yeah, the video is really cheesy... The music, especially. :-)