I have used most of the NLEs out there, and...

NonLinear Editors (NLEs) seem to have flourished in the last few years. The price range shows systems from free (Windows Movie Maker) to Avid Liquid Pro (over a grand). I am sure the range is even higher but I am talking about things I can afford.

Let's get the trash out of the way first. If you have XP or Vista, don't even bother opening Windows Movie Maker. Typical of most Microsoft products, it was apparently a half-baked idea then someone forget to turn on the oven to finish it. When XP first came along, I spotted WMM, and went "Hmm, what's this?" Well, MS did not deliver a movie maker but a space-taker. Titling didn't work. No PTZ features. Forget the rest. Let's talk about editors, real editors.

I work mostly with pictures not video. I make the pictures move. That means I have to have control over features like pan, zoom and rotate. One of the first product that did that was Movie 10 by Magix.

Movie 10 worked pretty well. it had drawbacks but still produced a nice AVI file. The image quality looked good and the render times weren't too bad. But being the OCB techie I am, I had to try others. I knew there were better products out there.

I bought Pinnacle Studio 10 -- this is the "poor man's" video editor. I call it that because not only did version 10 not work well out of the box, but every thing you might want to do required you paying for a license for the particular feature. IOW, you'll be poorer for using Pinnacle.

Now I have to say the output AVI looks really good but not worth the hassle and extra expense Avid imposes.

That's it for today. Tell me what you think.