Sony Movie Studio Platinum 12 review

1 / 4

Consumer video-editing software gets more sophisticated every year, but all we really want is to be able to do simple things quickly. Selecting and ordering clips, trimming the start and end points, applying colour correction and adding the odd dissolve transition makes up about 95 per cent of the editing process. Dramatic special effects are the icing on the cake, but it doesn’t matter how tasty the icing is if the cake’s a disaster.

That’s why Sony Vegas Movie Studio has done consistently well in our reviews over the years. Its business-like appearance and lack of extras might not endear it to home users, but the speed and precision of its core editing tools will be a hit with anyone.

The advanced colour-correction effects are quite technical, but nothing else at this price matches them for surgical precision

Clips can be arranged and truncated without the slightest hint of delay. Colour correction is extremely sophisticated, with the ability to alter a limited range of colours plus three-way colour correction for adjusting colours in the shadows, midtones and highlights.

It doesn’t score so highly for creative effects – there’s nothing to rival Pinnacle Studio Ultimate’s film simulation effects, for example – but Movie Studio is perfect for technically minded users who want to design elaborate effects from first principles.

Movie Studio’s fast, precise timeline controls are, as always, its greatest strength

Its comprehensive ripple-editing options let users control how clips react when others on the timeline are moved or truncated. For most projects, you’ll want the software to automatically make space or close gaps when a clip is adjusted, but there are times when they should stay put – when editing in time to music, for example. This kind of control is frustratingly rare among consumer editors, and it’s typical of the way Movie Studio puts the user firmly in the driving seat.

Sony has mysteriously dropped the Vegas brand for this latest update, and the website has no mention on new features. The improvements might not make for great marketing material but they’re extremely valuable. It’s now available as a 64-bit application, and the benefit to preview performance is dramatic. Whereas version 10 managed to play four simultaneous AVCHD streams on our Core i7-870 test PC, version 11 managed seven when running on Windows 7 64-bit.

The boost given by the new GPU acceleration was even more dramatic. This is used to power 36 of the 51 available effects, including all the most important ones: colour correction, stabilisation, Gaussian blur, chroma keying.

The editor gives a clear readout of the preview frame rate, and we measured improvements from 300 to 2,100 per cent as a result of this acceleration. Export times received a significant boost, too. Both ATI and nVidia graphics cards are supported, thanks to the OpenCL protocol.

We experienced a couple of crashes and occasional glitches to previews, though. Considering Movie Studio’s previously rock-solid reliability, we’d guess that this is the result of the graphics acceleration. Still, we’ll put up with the odd hiccup for the enormous benefits this acceleration brings. For those who disagree, it can be disabled in the Preferences.

Sony has doubled the number of video and audio tracks to capitalise on this power, with 20 of each now available. Also new is the introduction of keyframe lanes and Bézier curves, which give far more precision over varying effects settings.

Multiple keyframe lanes and Bézier curve editing unlock a new level of precision for the effects

It’s one of the features that previously put Movie Studio behind Adobe Premiere Elements for power, so it’s great to see it finally included. However, it’s still missing in the one place we want it most – the Pan/Crop editor for animating the size and position of visual elements.

It’s a shame the Pan/Crop tool is still stuck with a single keyframe lane and minimal control over the path between keyframes

There’s a smattering of interface tweaks, including new buttons and keyboard shortcuts for Trim Start and Trim End. We’ve always liked the way Movie Studio builds lots of controls directly into clips on the timeline, and these are better laid out and visually clearer than before.

It’s an extremely close call choosing between the current crop of consumer video-editing packages, with Sony, Adobe, Pinnacle and Serif all in reach of the top spot. Sony’s editor is the most polished of the four, but it does lag behind the others for features. Still, if your PC is fast enough to handle HD video, and if you prefer to wow audiences with your footage rather than fancy editing techniques, Movie Studio Platinum is our top recommendation. For something a bit simpler, Serif MoviePlus X6 is a great choice for most users.