Review by CKE

I create and produce hundreds of small info videos each year, and I have searched for the perfect easy to use video editing software. After using several software suites I have decided that the perfect video software doesnt exist. Although Ultimate Director is pretty close to the top. In this review I am not going to list each feature. The list is way too long. However, I do want to compare it to other video editing software that is out there based on my experiences and usage.

iMovie HD The king of the easy to use software. I stuck with iMove for several years because you could produce decent videos without investing much time in learning the software. This was a big mistake on my part. iMove HD is very slow and lacks features once you use (and learn) a few of the other video suites on the market you realize that iMovie HD is unacceptable.

Final Cut A HUGE jump from iMovie in terms of price, features and performance. It is such a quantum leap that unless you are a very serious videographer it may be beyond your needs. Final Cut requires a large investment in time, money (for the software and a high end computer) so be prepared.

Adobe Elements Not as easy to use as iMovie HD, but still rather easy to use. Adobe Elements provides most of the features that basic to intermediate users will need. It gives you the ability to use multiple cameras and PIP. It also has a wide variety of features for saving your videos - again, it is very straight forward. Adobe Elements is not quite perfect - it is a bit of a processor hog when rendering HD videos, and unless you have a beefy computer (at least 8gig or ram and a decent video card) it will take you up to 45 minutes to render a 300meg file. Another annoyance is that (for some reason) it only recognizes the audio portion of an .avi format (at least for me). Having said that - it is still my favorite video processing software.

Ultimate Director More features than Adobe Elements - but it is not quite as intuitive to use. Surprisingly, Ultimate Direct is quicker rendering files than Adobe Elements. Ultimate Director has more options and features, but it is not as easy to save a specific type of file. i.e. if you want to save a file optimized for YouTube in HD Ultimate Director tries to post the video directly onto YouTube instead of writing to a file.

Roxio - Not quite as straight forward as Adobe Elements and not as powerful Ultimate Director. I have used it a couple of times, but I never really saw an advantage. While I may be wrong (due to inexperience) I was never able to do PIP or use multiple videos source.

Ultimate Director Notes- Just a small list of features (that I have used)nn- Allows you to speed up or slow down the videonn- Will allow you to capture from multiple sources and use PIPnn- Never had any issues in reading and recognizing filesnn- Has a 3d Mode (which I have never used)nn- Pretty easy to delete audio and dub/narrate over videonnFinal Verdict - While no one software is perfect the combination of Ultimate Director and Adobe Elements comes pretty close. Adobe works great for smaller projects while Ultimate Director can be used for bigger projects or to create small clips for larger videos.

4 Stars