How many times has this happened to you. You go out and get a nice top end video capture card, and you take it home, install it, plug in the software, and then try to use it. Chances are you would get something like Premiere 6.0, or Mediastudio Pro 6.0, or even (depending on the card) an AVID product. You start capturing your footage, and then you open your editing software. BOOM right from the get go, you are lost. You root around in the box for the destructions, yet you find none, you look on the cd for the instructions and you find none (either that or the documentation is so vague that you wouldn't even care to read it). After all the options are exhausted, you have a couple choices, either go to school for a couple years to get your Doctorate in Video Editing, or find other solutions.

Before the Saints at Sonic Foundry shone their light on us, Premiere and Avid designs were the most popular video ediing suites available, MediaStudio Pro was another emerging product, still a little simpler to use, but confusing enough.

Sonic Foundry started mainly with high end audio editing products which were a breeze to use. (I pretty much owned every single build of Sound Forge available). What they did was to couple their prize winning audio editing software, with a very intuitive compositor interface, and laid all the features in functional positions, so most of the tools are less than a couple clicks away. Do you know what Heaven looks like? Just download the demo and you will see the light, buy and download the full version, and you will have a halo around your head.

As you can see, I love this program. I haven't tried all the features yet, I have composed some awesome streaming video for a friend of mine, just took me a moment. all you have to do is go into the file menu, select "render as" and everything is brought to you in presets. Of course these are customizable to the advanced user, but the presets produce a very good final cut indeed. All you have to do is select the codec, beit quicktime, windows media or whatnot, and select the connection speed. Budda bing budda boom, finished video in no time without having to dick around with settings galore.

The best thing is the cost, coming about 1/4 of the cost of Premiere, and that you won't have to mortgage your house for AVID........Its just like a very famous German person (from History) and the Volkswagen, the vision of building a car for everyone to drive, that everyone can afford.


If you want a piece of software to edit your video on, and don't want to take a couple years in school or have to mess around with massive manuals, 2x the size of war and peace, get this software. If you want to have all the functions available right at your fingertips, get this software, if you want presets for video output, that don't require guess work to find out what format jives with what codec, get this software, if you like the best for the price....well you know.....yadda yadda yadda.

Recommended: Yes