Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 11 review

Sony Vegas has an illustrious track record in our reviews, both for Vegas Pro and the consumer-oriented Vegas Movie Studio Platinum editions. The reason for its success hasn’t really changed in its 10-year history: responsive performance and streamlined core editing tools mean that it’s incredibly quick to try out ideas. That keeps the focus on creativity rather than technical decisions or staring wearily at shuddering previews or hourglass cursors.

Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 has seen off its rivals to remain our favourite consumer video-editing software for the past year, so it shouldn’t be too much of a struggle for version 11 to retain pole position. However, with a major update to Adobe Premiere Elements just around the corner, does Movie Studio Platinum 11 do enough to stay one step ahead?

3D editing and text animation templates are the headline new features in Vegas Platinum 11

Vegas Platinum can now edit footage shot with 3D cameras such as the Fujifilm Finepix Real 3D W3 or the Panasonic HDC-SD90 with its optional 3D lens. It’s all pretty straightforward, with 3D previews either as a red/cyan anaglyph or via a monitor that supports Nvidia 3D Vision or has interlaced polarised lines.

There’s a new effect with a Horizontal Offset slider, which adjusts the left- and right-eye images to bring a clip, text object or other media into or out of the screen. 3D projects are uploaded to YouTube at up to 1080p with the necessary tags so YouTube knows what to do with it.

It’s also possible to create fully fledged 3D Blu-ray discs – a first for consumer editing packages. These discs lack menus, though, and some will be frustrated by its lack European compatibility. 1080p50 isn’t supported by the Blu-ray specification, so we can’t blame Sony for that, 720p50 is supported though, but frustratingly absent here. So if you have a Panasonic 3D-capable camcorder (which do not support 24p), you’ll need to mess with the frame rate of your video to master 3D Blu-ray discs.