SONY Vegas Movie Studio +DVD review

Sony Vegas started life as professional audio recording software.

A shift in focus, a change in publisher and two name changes later, this cut-down version of the £650 Vegas +DVD suite offers some serious power for its price. There's a range of classy effects, including accomplished chroma keying for blue screen video overlays, some fun deforming effects and a number of others that interact with the footage rather than creating a blanket effect over it. Text formatting and animation is comprehensive, audio is handled elegantly and Pan/Crop allows video clips and still images to be animated with precise control.

However, Vegas Movie Studio is more of a cut-down product than Premiere Elements is to Premiere Pro. They both lack their pricier siblings' advanced colour controls, surround-sound support, layer compositing modes and various other advanced features. However, Vegas Movie Studio also dispenses with cutout masks and limits track counts to three video and three audio. Meanwhile, its effects only have start and end settings rather than full automation of parameters. Premiere Elements has no such limitations, which gives it a clear advantage for complex edits.

Still, Vegas Movie Studio makes up for this in its ease of use. The timeline is incredibly quick to navigate, with fast thumbnail redraws and the mouse wheel acting as a zoom control. A large number of tasks such as adding dissolve transitions and creating slow- and fast-motion effects can be achieved directly on the timeline with the mouse rather than trawling through menus or toolboxes. These factors combine to make Vegas Movie Studio considerably faster to use than its competitors.

Sony also tops the class for DVD authoring. A separate application, DVD Architect Studio 2, is included for this purpose, and it's just as flexible and easy to use. There's a reasonable set of preset menu themes, but text and images are fully editable and can be freely arranged on the page or multiple pages. It can import Photoshop .PSD files with transparent backgrounds, allowing you to design your own buttons from scratch. Disc navigation options aren't as comprehensive as DVD-lab's as there's no control over end actions, but you have full control over what appears on each menu and submenu, and creating chapter selection pages and slideshows is easy. Unlike DVD-lab, you can preview discs to test what links to what, and previews appear complete with animated backgrounds and buttons.

In some respects it's not as powerful as Premiere Elements, but Vegas Movie Studio +DVD is still capable of complex, precisely executed edits. It can cope with all but the most demanding projects, and many users will prefer its ease and swiftness of use to Premiere Elements' advanced features. The price is a problem, though, justified only by DVD Architect Studio's superiority over Premiere Elements' basic authoring. Sony's download price of $99 (around £53) is a steal for those who can cope with the 65MB download.