Others say...

"Painful to use and must pay for support"
This is a very poorly designed product. It provides a large array of options and editing capabilities that are not organized very logically. What's more, with so many choices, you are very prone to making mistakes that could waste a lot of your time. Perhaps the most annoying aspect is that they don't have free technical support. If you are stuck on something, it will cost you at leat $14.95 to get telephone support. I ended up using Apple iLife. The combination of iMovie and iDVD is a much better package, particularly for editing HD movies.

"Take it from a semi-pro, this is a deal!"
At work, I edit commercial DV video using Final Cut Pro 5 and do effects in Apple Motion on a powerful MAC workstation. I'm also learning After Effects 6.5 Pro & 7 Pro. I needed something cheap to do small home projects. I also needed something for creating DVD's.

I did a lot of research on the best Windows based DV NLE (digital video non-linear editor) in the $50 - $150 price range and Sony Vegas Movie Studio came out on top in every category especially with end user satisfaction and stability. I looked at: Adobe Premiere Elements, AVE Visual Editor, Avid Free DV, Cyberlink PowerDirector, EditStudio, Jashaka, MainActor, Magix Movie Edit Pro, Pinnacle Studio, Roxio VideoWave, Ulead Videostudio, Vegas Movie Studio, Video Edit Magic and Windows Movie Maker. Again, Sony Vegas Movie Studio came out on top in every category especially with end user satisfaction and stability. Many of the other top programs received so many complaints of instability, software crashes and OS system file corruption that I was surprised and disappointed. So I knew Vegas Movie Studio was the only real choice. With the trial version, I was able to do some nice editing and was sold on it immediately! Why?

Sony Vegas Movie Studio really surprised me to be so power packed with features I would have only expected in a professional editor such as ripple, 4 tracks of video and 4 tracks of audio; the ability to reorder tracks by stretching them above or below other tracks; the ability to layer video/audio and do simple compositing; the ability to repeat content on a track by dragging it on along the timeline ... a feature even Apple Motion can't do without having to create new layers. Although some of the features are a bit childish the way they are displayed such as Video FX samples and text editing being somewhat limited, I still remind myself that this is a $100 consumer level product. Then there are keyframes for precise timing control!!! Man!! Keyframe editing in a $100 program! This is the bomb!! Oh yeah, 3-Wheel primary color correction like in Final Cut!! It can output in Quicktime .mov format too!! It can display output on an external monitor. It can adjust the speed and even reverse video in a very intuitive way! It can be extended with plug-ins. This is almost crazy! ... for $100!! No way! If you dig deep, tweak some of the settings and utilize the keyframes, you can get some unexpected multi-layered video effects that take PIP (picture-in-picture) to a whole new level! ... far beyond what I found in the manual or the company advertises can be done.

Of course, it's not perfect. The DVD Architect Studio is a joke; especially compared to iDVD on a Mac. There's absolutely no imagination on the part of the theme designers whatsoever and the software's ability to design cool motion based menus, if possible, is lame at best! I haven't tried ACID XMC yet. Nor have I checked out the bundled sound effects yet. I just wish the video editor had better support for compositing. I'd love to be able to incorporate Digital Juice wipes, overlays and alpha channel stills. I guess I'm just spoiled by the pro apps. No video scopes either but this IS consumer level software.

Nevertheless, the NLE video editor alone at the low price I paid is well worth giving the software 5 stars! Kudos to Sony!

"Great program!"
For a company that so obviously hates its customers, Vegas Movie Studio Platinum is a wonderful, feature-rich product at a reasonable price. Being new to video editing I researched several products but this one did everything that I needed without breaking my bank account. My only quibble is the high learning curve necessary to use some of its features and a lack of automation that makes some aspects of the program overly complicated -- for example, another program I have does the "Ken Burns Effect" much better and is easier to use, but it's not a true video editing program. The color correction feature of Vegas is also more difficult than it should be because there doesn't seem to be a way to automatically adjust the color in the manner of Photoshop and other programs, but it's still workable. Those are minor issues with an otherwise great program and it would be hard to find a better value in video editing software.

"Hrmm...I like."
Do not buy Pinnacle, Adobe, or Vegas (or any other program for that matter) without first downloading their 30-day trials (yes, they each have one). I did that, and found that Vegas spoke to my style. Click, drag, stop clicking. It's not that hard. Browse through your files and drag the video into the timeline (which you can customize to be the size that you want, since the layout has several boxes that can be rearranged to your liking). Go to the properties and change the play speed of a video to half as fast, and use the ACID music studio to slow the speed (and pitch) of the sound down as well. When you're done, make a DVD using the Architect. Use the Capture Video to work with your firewire or usb port (you may need an additional utility to transfer via a composite wire...the yellow, red, and white cords...). Basically, play with it in the trial, see if you like it, and maybe buy it. Best 90$ (I got it on sale) I ever spent.

I made a feature length film with my high school buddies on this nifty thing. Sure, my harddrive is now devoured by the files (movie files are gigantic and require ram, for those of you who are complaining because you don't have the 512mb that it needs). I've successfully bluescreened a face onto a tree to make it look alive, and I even used the ACID program to lower the pitch of his voice - No one recognized who played him, and it looked magnificent. I know my stuff, so using only a solid color of cyan and a picture of one butterfly wing I downloaded from Google, I made a fluttering and flappy winged fairy that I bluescreened onto the screen where my actors had been talking to nothing. Using the transition elements, I made a Yu-Gi-Oh card-duelist scene where the defeated fighters would zip out via a spinning card slide. I was also able to edit the picture as I pleased, whether it meant coloring it red (evil..ooo!), making something filmed during the day appear night with the night filter, adding some light bursts to create some sweet special effects, or simply taking something that was filmed standard screen and making it wide screen. You can edit any effect or transition that you want, and you can even save your layout so the "Night-Filter" which is actually just a 'color-curve' can be sitting right next to the effect you customized: the blood-red filter.

You can edit to so many video formats, but this is only the home-edition, remember, so don't expect high quality hollywood style formats (although the platinum does offer HDV formats, which is amatuer quality). The movie maker works with the DVD maker so that it'll even tell you what format works best on the DVD Architect. Here are a few: Mpeg-1, Mpeg-2, Quicktime, Real Video, AVI, wmv, and if you use the more complicated rendering selection you can go a bit further into the file formats that nobody uses or cares about.

If you don't have a fast computer, don't buy this. Not because this software sucks on slow computers, but movie editing and dvd burning in general needs an up-to-date supply of harddrive (I advise 40gb at least) and ram (256mb, but preferably 512mb) (recommended requirements are the wisest to follow). That's the tech specs.

This program suited my movie-making methods. I liked the drag-n-drop personally, as well as the many file formats, the dvd program, the music program, and all the cool effects as well. They even update their site (not often I must add) with cool things like DVD templates, moving background videos, backdrops, buttons, etc - but honestly, you can make anything you want through this program with some good ol' Paint and Google Images. You can either take a treasured childhood video, tinker the image a bit (if it was recorded badly it wont change much, sorry. *is a Film Major*) to make it look better and plop it on a DVD for family storage and treasure, OR you can do what I did. Make a 2hr 42min feature length film with a Sony Handycam, making even your own floating fairies and talking trees and epic adventures.

May I also add that if you're willing to pay the (what is it?) 1000$ or 2000$ (or whatever it is) bill, you can even upgrade your studio by a download. But that's for the Pros. You aren't a Pro, are you? Vegas Movie Studio is wonderfully adapted from professional software to suite home movie editing. Try it. I dare you.

"Complicated interface and buggy!"
This thing is not intuitive and am yet to burn a working dvd. I have tried Sony, Magix, Adobe and Pinnacle. In my opinion, Pinnacle is the easiest to use and most feature rich. Don't waste your time with this product. Sony should stay away from the Software market.