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In this first of four installments of the Battle of the Software NLEs, we'll compare five leading tools-Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro, Avid Xpress Pro, Pinnacle Liquid Edition, and Sony Vegas-as they performed in three operations essential to pro video editing: Overlay, Chromakey, and Color Correction.
all video editors have two different types of features: subjective and objective. Subjective features focus primarily on usability, how intuitive an editor is to work with, and how quickly and easily it performs the splits, trims, cuts, pastes, and insert-this-here/delete-that-there actions that make up most of video editing. Give two reviewers the same program, and their opinions about these subjective features could easily vary by 180 degrees.
Then there are the objective operations, like Color Correction, Chromakey, Speed Change, Image Stabilization, and similar modifications. You can apply them to a clip or clips, assess the result, and reach a somewhat objective opinion. Certainly there is some subjective element to these tasks -such as how well the controls suit your experience level and editing eye-but give two programs to two different reviewers, and the results from these tests should prove reasonably similar.
Here we attempt to measure what is measurable, the objective tasks that most video editors perform and how skillfully each NLE carries them out. Consider it a heptathlon comprised of the following events: Chromakey, Color Correction, HDV editing, Slow Motion, Image Stabilization, Slideshow output, and overall Rendering. Our contestants are Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, Apple Final Cut Pro 5, Avid Xpress Pro HD, Pinnacle Liquid Edition 6.1, and Sony Vegas 6. Since most users of Premiere Pro will also have Adobe After Effects, courtesy of Adobe's aggressive bundle pricing, we also performed chromakey tests with After Effects.
These are all complex subjects (admittedly, some are more complex than others), and to do them justice, a thorough comparison runs much longer than a single article can accommodate. Thus, we have broken down the Battle of the Software NLEs into four segments. In this segment, we'll look at Overlay, Chromakey, and Color Correction. Next month, Part Two will examine HDV performance and workflow, possibly the hottest postproduction issue for videographers today. Part Three will cover Slow Motion and Image Stabilization, and Part Four will look at Slideshow performance...