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

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

Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0 software makes it easy to create home videos like a famous director. And it's brought to you by the makers of Adobe Photoshop, the #1 image-editing software in the world. Harness the power of a Hollywood studio with special effects, titles, credits, and Dolby Digital sound. Then show your personal masterpiece to family and friends.

Easily transfer DV footage by USB or FireWire directly to the timeline so you can start editing sooner. Use the new Media Downloader to import video, audio, and still images from virtually any device, including DV and DVD camcorders, unprotected DVDs, digital still cameras, MPEG-4 video recorders, and cell phones. Easily delete unwanted scenes and the timeline automatically adjusts for you.

Save time and eliminate guesswork by clicking thumbnails that let you preview effects and transitions before you apply them. Make your video more dynamic with moving text and graphics. Use preset TV-style effects, or customize effects to create your own look.

Be an art director! Design custom DVD menus from scratch, or choose from dozens of menu templates that you can personalize with your own images and audio. Add moving backgrounds, move and resize buttons, edit text, and more.

Download Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0 in Softonic

Video Workshop is a digital video converter / editor for home video processing and for people who are just getting started with video editing. Video Workshop provides an easy-to-use interface and is designed for the everyday user. The main function of Video Workshop is to convert video files from one format to another, extract single frames to image files, cut a part of file into new video file, merge two or more files in one, rip audio tracks from video files to mp3 or wave files, and mix audio files (mp3 or wave) into a new video file.

More Features:

• Free video player
• Export video frames to separate image files.
• Video Converter, (support AVI, MPEG, WMV, ASF, RM, MOV, QT ...)
• Making MPEG Movies for VCD, SVCD and DVD
• Extract audio tracks from video files and save them to separate mp3 or wave.
• Video Cutter, split a part of video file into new video files by selecting the start time/frame and end time/frame.
• Video Joiner, merge selected video files into one video file
• Video / Audio Mixer: Mix mp3 or wave file into video file, and save to another new format video file.
• User Friendly & Specially Designed For Users.

Download Video Workshop 1.41 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

Foto2Avi is a freeware basic video and photo converter with support for AVI, MPEG and FLV video formats. It is an video editor too. The program features special effects such as:

• Transitions (Flippage, Swirl...)
• Basic Effects (Brightness/Noise/Fade in/Fade out)
• Advanced Effects (Distort, Ripple)
• Animations
• Subtitles
• Logos

Any of these effects is highly customizable. You have a wide range of effects available to edit and customize your video. The only limit is your imagination!

Foto2Avi supports external audio sounds (MP3/Ogg/WAV) and can trim audio video streams with milisecond precision, so you can edit your sounds synchronize them with your videos. You can save your work in *.f2a project files so you cannot lose your workand reload them later.

Foto2Avi is easy to use after a couple of minutes using it, you will understand it and you will be able to produce your films!

Download Foto2Avi 1.7 in Softonic

Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities.

Avidemux is available for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows under the GNU GPL license. The program was written from scratch by Mean, but code from other people and projects has been used as well. Patches, translations and even bug reports are always welcome.

Download Avidemux 2.4.3 in Softonic

particleIllusion lets you create any sort of particle effect easily. Whether you are looking for an explosion, flash, spray, drip or any other sort of effect, you should be able to find it in particleIllusion, which contains more than 1500 particle effects.

Even though the interface itself is a little counter-intuitive, adding an effect to an image or video is relatively easy. Load up your video or image in particleIllusion, select the effects you want and add them, play around with the settings until you have reached the desired result and render the file before exporting it.

The parameters give you a lot of flexibility, however I did find them a little difficult to work with, particularly the graph view.

Luckily particleIllusion comes with a full online tutorial to guide through every step and help you really become familiar with the program.

Although a little counter intuitive, particleIllusion is a great tool with over 1500 particle effects to add to your video or image.

Download particleIllusion 3.0.3 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

SuperDVD Video Publisher brings together in a single program all the necessary tools to edit videos that do not require a professional touch.

The input window shows the various bars in which the program is structured. First you can extract capturing video from any camcorder, webcam, and so on. Secondly, the editor itself, to make cuts, adds multiple tracks of audio and video, including transitions, etc. Then you also have the screen effects and the editing stage in the DVD menu. Here you can customize the screen automatically when introducing a DVD in the drive. Finally, it remains only to save the movie with a simple click and set the format in the editor. In addition to all this you can also change the play speed and add a limited number of video effects as well as gain full control over the audio and the video streams. There's also options to directly burn into VCD DVD format for playback on external DVD players.

A basic but powerful DVD editing package that doesn't offer many advanced options but does the job quickly.

Download SuperDVD Video Editor 1.5.5 in Softonic

AVS Video Editor provides all features for creation of high-quality video - hundreds of effects and transitions, scene recognition, capturing from various external devices, a variety of unique templates for DVD burning and menu creation. An included full-featured Audio Editor, will let you to alter, trim and mix audio tracks for your video project. AVS Video Editor presents a perfect combination of attractive price and quality performance.

Download AVS Video Editor 3.5.1.346 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

Start working with video with AVS Video Tools. Convert video files between all supported video formats. Copy DVD and video files to DVD, hard drive, Sony PSP or new Apple iPod. Remove parts from MPEG 1, 2, 4 and DVD files without re-encoding. Make and transfer video for mobile phones or portable video players via Infrared, Bluetooth or USB.

Make Flash, Real Video or WMV movies for your web site. Transfer video from DV, VHS, WEB cams and TV tuners to DVD or hard drive. Extract audio tracks and images from video files. Enhance and edit your movies, rotate, add logo, delete episodes, apply effects.

Download AVS Video Tools 5.6.1.705 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

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

Ulead® MediaStudio Pro 8 is powerful, versatile and intuitive video editing software, for professionals and enthusiasts in independent production, event videography, business, and education. Integrated, quick-to-master tools take you to the forefront of professional real-time HDV, DV or MPEG editing.

Realize your vision

Smart Compositor: Create Professional-quality opening sequences or segues instantly

Smart Proxy: real-time mobile HDV editing on a notebook PC

Create Dolby® Digital 5.1 Surround audio tracks

Get the job done

Single-track editing interface, with virtual clips

SmartSound Auto Music: custom royalty-free soundtracks

Enhanced integration with the entire family of Ulead tools

Meet any challenge

Future-ready with extensive HDV support

Built-in authoring tool to author single- or double-layer DVDs

Download Ulead MediaStudio Pro 8.0 in Softonic

If you're looking for an easy-to-use video and photo editor, Pinnacle VideoSpin is definitely a good choice.

Don't be mistaken: this is no replacement for big shots like Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas. However Pinnacle VideoSpin works perfectly well for the average user who wants to create an easy video presentation including video clips, photos, sound effects and background music.

The program features support for the most popular file formats, plus a nicely designed interface that divides the working area into three main sections: the list of material you can add to your presentation, a preview window and a timeline that enables you to organize every element in terms of the position they occupy in the presentation, the amount of time they take and the transition effects between them, among other settings. There's also a special tool to create title screens.

Once your presentation is ready, Pinnacle VideoSpin allows you to save it into a variety of formats and support, including AVI, DivX, iPod compatible video or MPEG.

Pinnacle VideoSpin is an intuitive presentation tool with which average users can easily create their own photo and video shows.

Download Pinnacle VideoSpin 1.0.2.410 in Softonic

VideoMach is a powerful audio/video builder and converter. Use it to construct video clips from still images, enhance your recorded material or convert video, audio and image files between popular media formats.

VideoMach features:

• Suports popular video and image formats (mpeg, avi, divx, flc, jpeg, png, tif, gif, bmp and more)
• Reads and writes standard Linux and UN*X image formats (xpm, pnm, sgi, ras and more)
• Supports most popular audio formats (mp3, mp2, ogg, wav, ac3)
• Imports the output of high-speed imagers and time-lapse cameras (bayer, cine)
• World's fastest image sequence detection, more than 50,000 images per second
• Professional-quality MPEG, AVI and Bayer readers, video is decoded at highest quality unlike in most media players
• Fastest software MPEG encoder, more then 120 frames per second
• Can read or write very large MPEG files, up to million terabytes
• Creates industry standard VideoCD MPEGs by NTSC and PAL / SECAM video specs
• Connects to both Video For Windows (VFW) and DirectShow (DS) interfaces ensuring support for vaste number of AVI codecs / subformats
• Easy to navigate but powerful AVI output video / audio codecs selection dialog
• Integrated media player
• Fast, compact and reliable installer with built-in anti-virus check

Download VideoMach 5.0.5 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