Regularly I read magazine articles reviewing video editing software. Mostly they find that Adobe's Premier Pro is king of the heap. Each time I see this conclusion I scratch my thinning head and wonder how they arrive at such a conclusion.

Recently I have given access to a full version of the Adobe Master Collection, which is way cool, especially as it includes the awesome Photoshop and AfterEffects packages. Of course Premier Pro is also there so it was time to give it my own going over.

At the outset I must confess to having downloaded trial versions of most of the leading NLE programs several years ago. My main criteria at that time was that even though I had only ever used an old version of "Video Studio", I should be able to get something useful happening within 10-15 minutes without needing to resort to help manuals. Although "Pinnacle Studio" looked promising, it was Vegas Studio 4 that hooked me. Coming from a MS Windows backgroud it just made sense almost immediately with drag and drop placement, pusing two clips together created an automatic crossfade of video and audio, and then moving the cursor over a clip I noticed that it changed and with a few clicks I had fades and leve changes. Right click openned a context menu that gave fairly straight forward options. I was sold. 

 Roll forward to 2009 and I have now been using Sony Vegas Pro 8.0 (as it is now known) for close to 5 years. It is a productive tool the features and abilities of which I am still only scratching the surface. It now runs on an Intel platform with a quad core processor and is a valued part of our fultime ministry.

So now that I have Adobe Premier Pro CS4 installed I as keen to put the defacto industry standard (at least in the PC world) through its paces.