Feature: A trio of Video Editors from Adobe, Pinnacle and Ulead strut their stuff
Motivation:These "consumer" editors have some top of the line pro features

Video editing software may be the next point of attack between Apple and Microsoft if the TV commercials from Apple have anything to say about it - and of course they do. Mr. Apple guy constantly underlines the point that art and design functions are well served on Apples right out of the box while the PC Guy seems to be stuck on Nerdy number crunching and GUI C++. The message appears to be: "Buy a PC if you are nerdy and committed to 24/7 business - buy a Mac if you have an ounce of creative blood in you - especially in the movie making arena."

Well, this review will hopefully set the record straight on the PC side - there is commercial video editing software available on the PC and its pretty good. This review will look at 3 video editors on the PC whose Bizrate street prices respectively are $80-110US - Adobe Premiere Elements, $50-80US - Pinnacle Studio 10.5, and $80-100 - Ulead Video Studio 10.

But on the upside, this reviewer frankly did not expect to be able to do video and image slideshow editing with the degree of sophistication that these programs afford. By the way, one of the real attractions for photofinishers, is the ability to create slideshows with images only or mixed media - images, video, and music or narration with these programs. This is such a compelling feature that it will be covered in this overview of the major players.

Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0

Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 has the reputation for being the high priced spread with a few gotcha bugs and a hefty learning curve. I am happy to report the price is right, the heft in learning is now more smoothed or cleverly hidden, and the bugs are largely squashed - really a lot less than my experience with early Premiere and some of the other PC video editors that would appear to add a measure of truth to the humor that is Apple Mac TV ads.

So lets be clear from the outset - the bugs are out of Adobe Premiere Elements on the camera input side, on the impressive set of video editing capabilities, and on all the new iPod, DVD and HD output features. But there are some limitations. Adobe Premiere Elements really demands a 1GB machine, at 1.5GHz or better and lots of hard disk space. It also demands Microsoft Windows XP or new Vista operating systems (and hiccups with Vista on repeated video renderings). Finally, Premiere demands use of the SSE x86 instruction set in the processors it works with. This is vital - and disqualifies a lot of not so old Centrino and other PCs. It also requires extra setup work on AMD and some Pentium III systems. Good fortune for this reviewer it worked first time with a lengthy (10 minute) but uneventful install on my Toshiba Dual Core machine.

The screenshot above shows the video photo editor in action. The interface may look complex but in fact this is rapidly becoming the standard among all video editors:
1)Tabbed media resource area on the left;
2)a preview window in the middle with several editing controls;
3)detailed property and edit area on the right;
4) and sceneline or timeline as a strip along the bottom of the screen.
Interestingly this is very similar to the layout of the Visual Studio and Eclipse programming systems as well - just a few name changes for what can be done. And in fact Visual Studio Orcas, the next gen, is rumored to be bringing new animation and graphics deign and development capabilities to Microsoft. Already, the separate and sometimes innovative Expression Suite from Redmond shows that those darn Mac commercials have caught Redmond's attention.

The biggest improvement in video editing for Adobe in Premiere Elements is that it hides the inevitable complexity of video editing. Adobe has done so cleverly in three ways. First, editors can now use a sceneline to quickly create a video storyboard (or slideshow, see below). Just drag and drop the clips on the sceneline and insert transitions in between (again drag and drop from the left Media resources area's Effects tab). Or drop a video effect on the clip.

In the case of all these edits, the righthand properties panel changes as the attributes and properties users can use to control the clip, transition, or effect are made available. Complete control is being silently offered. In the example shown in the screenshot above, it is an audio clip, and the properties panel shows the fade-in and fade-out icons and controls available for use. Notice at the top of the property panel next to the eye icon, there is a diamond pointing down. This is how the new Premiere hides/reveals the learning curve heft.

When a clip or effect is first added to the timeline, the diamond points to the right and hides the all the properties and just uses a series of default settings. So if all you want to do is add an audio clip - bang, you are done. Next if you want to see more details you click on the diamond and all the detailed property controls are revealed. Also you can quickly switch from sceneline/storyboard view to timeline view by pressing the Timeline button on the extreme right top of the Timeline strip.

Finally, if you have questions on how to do some task, I recommend that you start with the HowTo button at the mid top of the screen. The popup set of How-tos are fast and cover the main tasks users want to do. They also feature wizards and links to specific areas on the screen making learning your way around the editor a faster experience. And the helps system gives all the details including some tutorials well worth the while.

Slideshows in Premiere

One of the features of the new video editors which demonstrates the convergence of video and photo worlds is the ability to create masterful slideshows. And Premiere Elements is one of the better tools because it allows photo finishers to use the Timeline (see screenshot above)and several (up to 99) video/slide channels at the same time. This allows for some of the most engaging overlapped and PIP-Picture in Picture transitions including fading in and out of several images. It is just wonderful.

And I have still not mentioned the fact that Premiere Elements also allows editors to employ video transition between slides and even apply most video effects to the slides as well. In sum, for a colleague who has worked with Kodak multi projector slideshows and has just converted to digital cameras - discovery of Premiere Elements and the other PC video editors was quite a revelation. Maybe the change to digital would not be so tough to swallow after all.

In these overviews I did not test the input or output capabilities of the software except to make simple videos and/or slideshows. I had no problems creating a slideshow in Premiere Elements. However, the size of those slideshows, nearly double that of Photo Producer in size for the equivalent basic show, has me looking for some optimizations. This is bad for disk storage space consumed, and online distribution but is livable with CD or DVD writing and distribution by snail mail.

Premiere Elements Summary

Adobe Premiere is fussy about the OS and hardware it will work with (check your version of Windows and its hardware requirements before buying)although Adobe has recently announced that Premier Pro will return to the Mac OS. This may eventually filter down to Premiere Elements. Also like most of the other tools, Premiere Elements cannot be fully exploited by the novice without understanding its many properties and options - these require an appreciation of video and animation methods. However, the new simpler interface and handy How To's make the program much more approachable.

Also Premiere Elements supported only one of the two warring high definition formats - HD DVD over Bluray( see our coverage of the DVD formats wars here). But despite these difficulties (which are shared with the other tools) and its slightly higher price, Premiere Elements for its stability, ability to do simple to sophisticated editing and its reported broad reach to hardware(a full review will be upcoming if there is interest) makes this the best choice among our three video editors.

Pinnacle Studio 10.5

On first encounter, Pinnacle Studio leaves a solid impression - 3 utilities to help manage your video and media assets including a media manager, quick DVD recorder, and a set of tutorials. But I should have gotten a feeling for what was to come with the above legalese and when I started up Media Manager. To my surprise the program took well over a minute to get going - something that I rarely see on my dual core 1.8GHz Toshiba portable using Windows XP/SP2. Media manager does do a reasonable job of offloading compute and storage intensive media managing tasks from the main Studio editor. Before starting a project in Pinnacle Studio, I would pre-organize all my image, audio, video media in directories using Media Manager. Its ability to preview sound clips, videos, and images is very helpful. And this means less clutter in the Pinnacle Studio interface which, like all the video editors, has enough to do right from the outset.

Pinnacle Studio was one of the pioneers in consumer video editor GUI layout. They helped popularize the style of tabbed interfaces for 3 major tasks - Capture, Edit, and Making/Burning a movie (see the screenshot below). Also Pinnacle Studio was quick to adapt the Movie Viewer window (top right in the screenshot) as a major control point in the edit process. So I had high expectations for this Microsoft bundle of Pinnacle Studio with Microsoft's own consumer Digital Image Suite 2006. What a disappointment was in store.

First, Pinnacle Studio took at least 4 minutes to start up on first try. Alarmed I closed it down rebooted the system, cleared away and closed all Services and items in the Tray that I could and then restarted Pinnacle Studio as the only application on a 1.8GHz Dual core 1MB of memory Toshiba Media Center PC. 2 minutes this time and I could never get the start up under a minute. Not good a good start.

But once up, Pinnacle Studio seemed to work reasonably responsively. I was able to work with the tutorial (see screenshot above)plus some of my own video clips with a fair amount of facility and no great slowdowns except to get some sound files. And in the Timeline I found it easy to add effects for transitions or to individual clips. Pinnacle Studio has a broad range of effects that can be applied to both video clips and images.

And I was able to write out to disk my finished simple films. However, when I decided to make a DVD with menus - horror city. The process simply would not work. Neither my internal Toshiba DVD nor my external Super-Multi drive would work with Pinnacle Studio. Since I did not have any blank CDs I decided to skip writing CDs and DVDs, instead I would start on my image slide show with over 100 images which both Ulead and Adobe had eaten up.

To my surprise, Pinnacle Studio just bombed every time I pointed to the files on my hard disk. Now I could perhaps understand if this was an external hard drive or some other special media - but this was the hard disk that Adobe, Ulead, and even Pinnacle's own Media manager could and did read and write to. So I pointed to a directory with just the 108 .jpg files - still no success. So I tried a directory with completely different image files - about 70-80, still bombs away. Given that everytime I restarted Pinnacle Studio it would take well over a minute to start up I was getting frustrated. So after 2 more tries I just stopped.

Now I am issuing a challenge to Pinnacle Software - get me a working version of your software and I will replace this review with that one no questions asked. I have used Pinnacle Studio software before on freelance assignments and it was very usable. This version is not - readers be appropriately forewarned.

Corel/Ulead Studio 10

Corel makers of the Corel Draw Suite, Paint Shop Pro, and the Word Perfect Suite have recently bought both Intervideo and Ulead software. This puts Corel more solidly in the video business

with the notable lack of either Mac OS or Linux versions of their Ulead product line. But as can be seen in the screen shot above, Ulead does have a classic tabbed video editor layout but with the movie preview controller on the left rather than in the middle like many other interfaces. But the important features like Sceneline plus Timeline views for the developing movie; basic channels - 2 video, 1 title, 2-audio including microphone annotation are available. And the key tool is the Resources dropdown at top middle of the screen. There is a wide choice of media, transitions, titling, and effects here - and any one can be changed and refined in the right panel of the screen with detailed property setting just like Adobe Premiere Elements.

And like all three video editors, most actions are drag and drop to the sceneline or timeline - including adding special effects to clips or images and transitions between images and clips. Ulead has many more of these transitions and about the same number of video/image effects as its competitors. But I found Ulead Studio to have some rather clever ones. I especially liked the boxed and 3D transitions.Also Ulead Studio provides a wealth of properties and controls to fine tune both transitions and effects. The danger here is extravagance. "Directors" will create a much too rococo movie experience.

One of the problems of reviewing with the Trial edition of Ulead Studio is that Help has been disabled. So I was not able to confirm if Ulead Studio has the ability to add extra video or audio channels to the timeline like in Premiere Elements. This is particularly useful for video in video shots and subtle overlapped image to clip or clip to clip transitions. As well, I did an experiment and used Ulead Studio to edit some video screen captures (using Snagit, a favorite tool)of Ulead Studio itself with idea of adding a self-describing clip of Ulead Studio to this website.

Annotating screen captures as either stand alone or added to a Powerpoint presentation is a real opportunity especially with Ulead Studio and Premiere Elements. However, if you want to pass along the demo clip - be careful. Just two minutes of demo at 800x600 pixels in size easily reached 25-35MB in size. Large even for many email systems and prohibitive for most downloads. So I looked to optimize and compress the video files as I become more movie savvy.

But without Help in Ulead Studio's trail version I could not figure how to get a 2 minute demo clip below 16MB in size without reverting to unreadable 320x240 15 frames per second. Adobe Premiere was only slightly better - after many hours of work I was able to get a 480x320 2 minute demo under 2MB in size but marginally readable. Clearly video compression and web delivery of videos are going to be a topic of growing interest. This will be even more so with the adding of two competing HD_High Definition DVD storage formats during 2007. Ulead Studio supports HD DVD but not the Bluray standard.

Ulead Studio Slideshow

One of the problems I had with Ulead Studio was the fact the app always runs maximized. This is a problem with how I work. For getting added media resources I like to run my desktop in MDI mode - Multiple Displayed Interfaces so I can quickly move among photo editor, media organizer and audio editor plus the video edit app. Despite this inconvenience, Ulead Studio is great as a slideshow app creator, especially with it numerous transitions and image effects and controls. Perhaps because still photos are so static - it is perfectly all right to employ exotic effects in slideshows. There is a history of multi-projector slideshows in the camera club traditions to draw upon.

But KISS works well in Ulead Studio as well. One can add Titling with fades and blend two audio tracks together and that can be all the "special effects" you need. However, I found it more difficult in Ulead Studio to do more sophisticated image-on-image or clip-on-image overlaps type effects than in Premiere Elements. Also I found fade-in and fade-out easier to do in Premiere Elements. But some of the transitions available in Ulead Studio were clearly superior. Call it a stand off - I will be using both video editors for upcoming slide shows.

Ulead Studio Summary

I found Ulead Studio very easy to work with despite the maximized screen, no help in the Trial edition, and somewhat unusual layout. Everything is simplified to getting the video editing workflow done. In fact, Ulead Studio has two standalone wizards available at start up - Movie Wizard and DV-to-DVD Wizard. These two mini-apps really simplify and accelerate the workflow so users can get get their movie or slideshow out in a hurry. It is this dedication to productivity that stands out in Ulead Studio. With a street price around $64US, Ulead Studio is attractive to users looking to get on board video editing in a hurry.