There are a number of video editing packages out there, from the simple Windows Media Maker to industry standards like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut. Sony’s contribution is Vegas Video and like most Sony products, it offers an original take on the editing genre.

Vegas actually began as an audio editing app and it shows – the entire feel of the program is more like an audio editing program than conventional video editing programs. On the plus side, Sony has emphasised giving users the greatest control over soundtracks and audio tracks to ensure that your film sounds great.

Sony Vegas Video 7.0 includes an entire suite of tools – Vegas itself as well as DVD Architect 4 to help you burn films and Dolby Digital AC3 coding software to enable you to offer broadcast quality sound in your productions. Vegas allows you to edit DV, HDV, SD/HD-SDI, and all XDCAM formats in real time and even give them surround sound. As HDV starts to become more popular, the ability to edit this particular format means that for some users, it’s their preferred editing package by default.

The video timeline works on a typical Windows drag-and-drop principle where you can add a myriad of effects to video and audio, cutting and splicing it with ease. However, as mentioned earlier, the interface is tailored more for audio than video editing. Unlike Windows Movie Maker or Adobe Premiere, the actual video preview window of what you’re working on is given little space, being tucked away in the corner. This is rather annoying when you’d rather see a decent preview of what you’re creating than have the timelines dominate the screen.

However, one nice feature of the layout is that the interface can be customised according to your preference. You can save these configurations so that for different projects, you can have different layouts. This is especially useful if you’re trying to concentrate on one particular aspect of your film such as special effects or rendering options. You can even create your own keyboard shortcuts, a handy option for those who are mouse-shy.

The audio features are first class though. Sony Vegas was one of the first to support 24 bit audio as well as 5.1 surround sound – usually the preserve of professional editing programs such as Avid. To add surround sound, you’ll need to use the Dolby Digital AC3 software. Another excellent Sony idea has been to add a network connection to other PCs during installation. So for example, if you’re working on a project with a friend, you can edit seamlessly in real-time together.

For creating really cool titles, Vegas now features the Sony ProType titler (available in the Media Generators tab) which allows you to make some really swanky looking graphics. There's also new digital signage support which allows you to create rotated projects for viewing on a vertical or inverted display. Encoding has also been improved with support for 10-bit video encoding when previewing or capturing from AJA SDI video cards.

Vegas is never going to compete with prosumer programs based on the traditional Avid way of editing. For those used to such programs, the interface could prove too awkward, limited and confusing to make editing video a pleasure. However, as regards sound, it can’t be touched. For many users, it makes the perfect package to polish the soundtrack on their film after editing it in another package. Be warned also that if you’re unfamiliar with video editing programs, it's going to take a while to get accustomed to Vegas, so the bundled tutorial is highly recommended.

Download Sony Vegas Video 8.0.217 b in Softonic

Make every frame count with Adobe® Premiere® Pro 2.0 software, the essential tool for professional video editing. Capture and edit virtually any format, from DV to uncompressed HD, and output to tape, DVD, and the web. Providing unparalleled integration with other Adobe applications, Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 sets new standards for efficient digital filmmaking.

Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 software revolutionizes nonlinear video editing. Powerful real-time video and audio editing tools give you precise control over virtually every aspect of your production. Built for the exceptional performance of Microsoft Windows XP systems, Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 takes video production to an entirely new level.

View effects, transitions, motion paths, and more with real-time, full-resolution playback on NTSC, PAL, and VGA monitors. Experiment more freely and easily manage complex projects more efficiently using multiple, nestable timelines.

Quickly remove unused material from your project and consolidate the project's media into one location for easy archiving with the Project Manager. Use color correction tools to adjust hue, saturation, and lightness for highlights, midtones, and shadows; replace a color throughout a clip with a single selection; and more. Produce richer, more vibrant audio using sample-level editing, track-based effects, 5.1 surround sound, and support for VST filters. You’ll get a jump start with a library of included VST plug-ins.

Download Adobe Premiere 2.0 Pro in Softonic

ArcSoft ShowBiz DVD is a simple yet powerful software application that has everything you need to edit home video and create professional looking DVDs. The software features a simple storyboard view for basic video sequencing and a more advanced timeline view giving you greater control over your movie clips, audio tracks and transitional effects.

What’s more, the program includes a powerful photo slideshow wizard and a full set of DVD authoring tools for turning your video productions into great-looking DVDs ready for enjoying on TV.

Download ArcSoft ShowBiz DVD 2.1.9.67 in Softonic

With digital camcorders and video editing software falling in price all the time, you don’t need to be Roman Polanski to make your own movies these days. Ulead’s VideoStudio has been at the forefront of the budget video software market for some time now and this latest releases promises even more value for hard-up users looking to make music videos, spruce up their home movies or produce documentaries on their life.

The application certainly looks good on paper, with a host of new tools for working with HD media, as well as a bevy of templates, video effects and filters, and capturing tools. There are three different apps bundled with the suite, catering for different needs and skill levels, including Movie Wizard and DV-to-DVD Wizard. However, it’s the main utility, VideoStudio Editor, where all the action happens.

The program certainly boasts some decent editing features, including an extended storyboard to view and sort scenes (alongside the ubiquitous timeline), an extra large scene preview window, customizable title and text templates, audio tracks for voice narration and a music score, and built-in instrumental scores to fit the length of your movie. The user interface doesn’t do too bad a job at making all of these features easy to tap into, but it will still take most virgin film producers a while to grasp the basics.

There’s no doubt that with a little practice, you can conjure up some decent looking creations in the package, but you’re sure to experience a few setbacks along the way. The main problem with VideoStudio has always been its strain on your system memory and unfortunately this doesn’t seem to have been addressed properly in this version. Load times are cripplingly slow and unless you’re using a NASA computer previewing complex edits can be horrible experience, with clips and audio jumping and lagging frequently.

Other annoyances include the fact that you can’t fast forward and rewind from the scene preview window, and the zoom facility on the timeline is not nearly powerful enough. Strangely, considering its support for the new HD disc format, Ulead appears to have neglected to include support for Blu-Ray too. Another point worth mentioning is that several Softonic users have hammered the technical support as being very poor, with many people reporting that their queries are consistently unanswered. Come on Ulead, if you’re going to bring out a program which sometimes falls over then at least give the customer a bit of help to put things right.

Despite its flaws, VideoStudio has enough features to enable the creation of fairly sophisticated videos, and it’s pretty easy to use once you get acquainted with the interface. Nevertheless, if you’re looking for reliability then you’d probably be best off looking at one of the other budget editing apps such as Adobe Premiere Elements or PowerDirector.

Download Ulead VideoStudio 10.0 in Softonic

VirtualDub is a video capture and processing utility licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is designed to be a general utility that can trim and clean up video before exporting to tape or processing with another program. It does not possess the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video.

It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files, which you can extend with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is best at processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and handle BMP image sets.

Download VirtualDub 1.8.6 Stable in Softonic

Nearly all software can be categorised as being from one of two groups: the programs that do one thing, normally fairly well, and the programs which do everything - often with some loss of quality. Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite (EMCS) is a classic case of the second type. While its capabilities are huge and impressive, they bring with them other problems like reduced performance and long load times.

The original cornerstone of Roxio's flagship product is CD and DVD burning. EMCS still packs a powerful tool for writing to disks but it's really all the extra functionality that makes this suite interesting. EMCS does it all: photo slide shows, video editing, iPod and MP3 player management, secure backups, multimedia organisation and video playback - to name but a few.

We tested each of the components and found that most of them perform to at least a satisfactory level. Sadly, Roxio included several design-related elements which annoy (like using custom window decorations, buttons and even file browsers when the Windows default shell is perfectly usable). Also, the suite contains numerous advertisements for new Roxio services which appear a little odd given that this isn't a free program. Likewise, Roxio's insistence on opening web links using Internet Explorer whether it's your default browser or not was disappointing: it's never a good sign when a program effectively forces you to do things its way or not at all.

The worst feature of the suite is without doubt the video player (called 'CinePlayer') which is nothing more than a run-of-the-mill movie player. After loading for nearly 30 seconds, it took ages to load a simple DivX file and crashed when a couple of buttons were clicked. When free players like VLC can do so much better, one has to wonder why Roxio didn't make an effort to deliver a really fast, lightweight player instead of the slovenly, unstable one bundled in this suite.

All that said, Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite is actually a pretty good bundle. We love the photo editing application which is fairly fast and has just the right balance of basic and advanced tools. The mobile phone photo wizard is a particularly cool utility which really did help camera-phone pictures look better.

The most significant problem with Roxio is the way it treats your PC. This is not a program which is designed to be removed once installed. It installs so many components to your system that you can easily lose track of them... and it fails to include a comprehensive uninstall application for the whole bundle. Instead, you must uninstall each component separately, a time consuming and irritating hassle. I'm still having trouble getting the 1.4 GB installer off my computer!

Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite is a powerful and comprehensive media suite. If you're looking for one bundle of software, which you'll never remove from your computer, to handle all your media tasks then this is the software for you. If, however, you prize quality over convenience, and have some respect for your hard-disk and registry, Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite is not recommended.

Download Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite 10 in Softonic

Video Edit Magic makes it easy to capture video footage onto the editing timeline and assemble a movie in mere minutes. You can add professional scene transitions, some background music, a couple of title effects, and get ready to show the world your finished masterpiece. You can even edit and combine popular file formats including AVI, WMV, ASF, MPEG, JPEG and many more, all on the same timeline.

Video Edit Magic supports making movies in MPEG Formats. This is the required format for creating VCD, SVCD, and DVDs. You can also create QuickTime and Digital Video AVI output formats. Movies can be made in both, NTSC as well as PAL standard.

A unique benefit of Video Edit Magic is the volume track which is displayed as a volume graph allowing you to change the volume of audio clips at any point from 0% to 400%. You can create fade-ins, fade-outs, Doppler effects, and almost any volume effect that may have required predefined effects.

Video Edit Magic makes it easy to join, split, crop, trim, modify color, and merge your video files. It includes more than 150 built-in transitions, making it ideal for hobbyists and professionals to turn ordinary videos into works of art.

Download Video Edit Magic 4.45 in Softonic

McFunSoft Video Capture/Convert/Split/Merge/Burn Studio is a premier solution in video manipulation. Video Capture, Edit, Convert and Burn are all supported by this powerful tool. This solution is the only ticket you need, from raw videos to any most-used video.

You can capture your happy time from your DV or other video device; or edit videos and burn to DVD/VCD/SVCD; even convert videos to the format you need in a website; within 4-steps, Video Capture/Convert/Burn DVD Solution will express your creative ideas and share them with your friends.

Main features of the software:

• Convert between all video formats
• Burn DVD, VCD or SVCD
• Enhance your videos
• Capture from DV and analog cameras, VCRs, TV tuners and webcams
• Batch processing mode
• Extract audio and images

Download McFunSoft Video Capture/Convert/Burn Studio 6.8.0.551 in Softonic

Flash Video Studio is a very easy and powerful tool to convert most video files into Macromedia Flash SWF and FLV.

Choose to publish a movie with or without a navigation control and apply some video effects such as emboss, motion blur, brightness/contrast, etc. to your video and previews it instantly without any rendering process.

Flash Video Studio shows the estimated bandwidth and the file size which enables you to adjust the quality settings that suits your target bandwidth and file size in an easy and efficient way or if you prefer you can simply choose from the list of common settings such as: Dial up 56.6k, ISDN, ADSL, etc.

Flash Video Studio allows you to select a range within a video timeline to publish, so you dont need other software to cut and trim your video files.

Download Flash Video Studio 2.2 in Softonic

Some video converters change movie formats and that's it, but AVS Video Converter does much more besides conversions.

AVS Video Converter allows you to capture the latest video formats which means DVD, SVCD or VCD's although it doesn't support HDV or BluRay yet. The video editor, while very basic, allows you to edit in classic style along a timeline and there's a handy wizard that helps you burn creations afterwards.

The latest release allows you to change the look with various skins so you can give it your own personal look which is unusual for a video editor. One excellent feature of the editor is that it helps you cut out adverts and other annoying commercial features which interrupt your films (useful if you've downloaded films or TV shows from the net). It uses a "Scene detection algorithm" to do this by splitting the video into various episodes leaving only the scenes you need.

An excellent all-in-one video converter and editor that will ensure your TV shows or movies are never ruined by TV ads again.

Download AVSVideoConverter 5.6.1.715 in Softonic

Full Motion Video (FMV) is a versatile multimedia viewer which views virtually every digital video and audio format currently used on the internet. From MPEG, AVIs, and Quicktime videos, to Real Media 8 and DivX, this comprehensive viewer watches them all. Full motion video also supports many other features, such as varying play speeds, audio and video playlist creating, fully customizable zooming, and other useful and fun features that allow the user to enjoy their video and audio clips in just about any way they can imagine.

Download Full Motion Video 5.99 in Softonic

Ulead DVD MovieFactory is everything you need for CD and DVD creation. Turn your videos and photos into high quality DVD movies. Burn data and music to CD or DVD in an instant. The Wizard workflow makes it simple.

Use any video from camcorders, VHS tapes, DVD recorders, TV programsfiles from the Internet, including photos for slideshows. Import and edit DVD discs recorded with set-top DVD recorders and play them on almost any DVD player.

In just a few steps burn digital video, VHS movies or TV programs straight to disc. No extra hard drive space needed. Express yourself freely by multi-trimming your video clips, adding exciting transitions, cool titles, background music, voice-overs, slideshows, and dynamic motion menus.

Take advantage of the latest technology to design personalized, fun-to-watch DVDs with speed & unlimited creativity. Enjoy and share professional-looking movies with motion menus on most DVD players or computers.

Download Ulead DVD MovieFactory 5.0 in Softonic

VirtualDubMod is based on the famous video editing software VirtualDub by Avery Lee. Born as a unification of several existing modifications, a lot of new features have been added, including support for the matroska container format.

Download VirtualDubMod 1.5.10.2 in Softonic

Fed up with shareware audio or video conversion tools? Had enough of frustrating file-format restrictions and endless pop-up boxes? Simplify your life with Video ToolBox - the answer to all your audio & video file conversion needs!

The easiest way to convert video & audio files. Through the wizard-style interface, import and edit multiple video clips, and output to popular formats including AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and WMV. Video ToolBox's simple workflow means no learning curve and quick editing, so users can easily create and share fun videos - ideal for MPEG-4 and Portable Media Players.

Download Ulead Video ToolBox 2 in Softonic

DvdReMake is a simple to use DVD editor designed to improve the quality and appearance of your DVD backups. Would you miss menus in languages you don't even know? Or may be your backups must have this long 10 minutes credits? Do you enjoy watching same copyright warning in bunch of different languages? What about studio logos and extras with ads of other movies? Do you have to watch commercials recorded by your DVD recorder over and over? Do you really need all these?

If "NO" is the answer to any of these questions then DvdReMake is the tool for you. Its unique "autobypass" feature will automatically change disk navigation to eliminate pauses in playback by "jumping over" the removed parts of the dvd directly to material you want to see. "Skip Blanks" will analyze video and automatically skip straight to something meaningfull so that you can easily identify what is on the disk and decide whether you want to keep it or not. In many cases your disk will fit nicely into DVD5 after your remove all unneeded material.

Download DvdReMake 3.4.1 in Softonic

One of the most tedious parts of the video editing process is cutting up your recording into identifiable scenes. TOKI Shot does a pretty good job of relieving you of this painful process. The movie analysis functions quickly identifies scenes in your recording and shows them in a list. You can also increase or minimize screen size by playing around with shot density. What we enjoyed in TOKI Shot is that you can also preview your video and edit parts of your recording or change time cuts manually by typing in a different time.

TOKI Shots is relatively simple to use, but we found it lacks any real explanation, especially for first time users. The fps rate drop down menu is good but it only gives you a choice between 23.976 and 30. We also liked the "delete shots" tools but inserting additional ones didn't really seem to work.

TOKI Shots is specialized in cutting up recordings into scenes and should be useful to people with limited video editors. Those with a top notch video editor probably won't find it necessary though.

Download TOKI Shot 1.2 in Softonic

Axialis MediaBrowser has been designed to let you easily manage your media files. It will be very helpful for you to organize and retrieve your favorite media files. With its built-in thumbnail explorer (with image and movie previews), browsing your computer folders for media files will be child's play! You can even create slideshows that mix several media types.

Use a powerful librarian to easily manage all your media files and create a collection. This is a dockable window (which can be hidden) where you can store, move, copy and extract all the files you're using frequently (images, movies, music). Also, you'll be able to add your files directly in the librarian. Retrieving them will be done in a click.

Download Axialis Mediabrowser 4.0 in Softonic

Director is the proven multimedia authoring tool for professionals. Director combines broad media support for media types, ease of use, high-performance, and an infinitely extendible development environment to deliver rich content and applications for CDs, DVDs, kiosks, and the Internet.

Director MX 2004 offers powerful new features, including two scripting languages, DVD-Video support, cross-platform publishing, and Flash MX 2004 integration.

Download Adobe Director MX 2004 10.1 in Softonic

Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX is a server based platform for creating and deploying compelling, interactive web-based audio/video applications such as video on demand, live event broadcasts, webcam chat, and real-time collaboration applications.

Download Flash Communication Server MX 1.5 in Softonic

ArcSoft VideoImpression® 2 is your ticket to cool home movies and slide shows. You don't need to be a computer whiz to put together awesome videos anymore. If you know how to drag-and-drop with your mouse, you're all set! In no time you can combine still images, video clips, audio tracks, text, and special effects into you very own movie. Make a VCD and play your movie on your DVD player!

Download ArcSoft VideoImpression 2.0 in Softonic