Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD 11 video-editing software

Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD is an affordable video-editing program that shares many of the features of Sony's more expensive professional-editing products. This makes it an excellent upgrade for people moving on from the free Windows Live Movie Maker.

Installation was simple – the Welcome screen gives the choice between starting and loading projects and starting the tutorials, which cover much of Movie Studio as interactive guides to the different tasks. A ‘Show Me How' button stays in the toolbar for help later on.

In the New Project window the user can select a video format based on either the source material or the final use. We were concerned that this would rule out working in custom settings but these can be set once the project has been created. The timeline has six tracks for text, video and music, and these can be replaced and extra tracks added if required, up to 10 each for audio and video.

Our first impressions of Movie Studio were that the interface was basic to the point of looking dated, though this turned out to be an advantage as the clear icons make the best use of screen space.

Icons for important editing options can be found at the end of clips on the timeline. The pan and crop and effects icons are always visible but there are others that may appear depending on what's being used. There are plenty of effects and transitions to apply to projects, all of which may be customised. It is possible to use a ‘green screen' to remove the background from videos, known as chromakey (any colour can be used for the background, not just green).

The video preview window can be detached from the main interface and moved to a second monitor if you have one. The preview shows both the current resolution of the project and the ‘preview' resolution. The latter is displayed in white when it matches the project settings, which is helpful. However, a quick way to resize the preview to the project resolution would have been handy, rather than having to do so by hand, as now.

On the Vegas DVD are some music, borders and illustrations that can be applied to your projects, but DVD access being rather slow compared with a hard disk, these will probably need to be copied to your computer before use.

Finished projects can be exported in several formats with options for direct uploading to Youtube and Sony's own video sharing website. Annoyingly, the resolutions of these output templates are fixed, but there are enough choices for most uses.

Unlike Sony's more expensive video-editing software, Movie Studio HD 11 cannot use the computer's graphics card to speed things up, or make 3D movies, but otherwise it's a hugely impressive editing program.