The Best DVD Editing Software

I just heard of the AVS Video Editor (and the AVS Suite in general) and decided to give it a try. The concept seems great, register one of their products and get all of them immediately. At almost $60, it seems like a reasonable price. I played with it for a while and here is the result (made with the default sample clips and audio):

This was uploaded directly after rendering without any extra processing

You can download your free copy here.

The features are not the greatest, but they seem to work fine. There are many prepackaged effects and transitions that add a lot of eye candy to your videos. There were some features missing, specially for more professional video editing jobs, like the lack of a precise time and frames control. For example, if you want an effect to last for 5 seconds, you have to calculate it yourself looking at the timeline and just approximate it. The user interface is not all that intuitive, but without looking at the help I was able to get most of it done and I believe I tried almost all of the features for the editing part. When it comes down to video editing, I would like a little more flexibility, but if you do not mind just going with the presets for the most part and just want to get a decent looking video in a short amount of time, this might be the software for you.

There are other features you might be interested in, for example, it has a wide variety of exporting formats, from straight to DVD quality to straight to YouTube and everything in between. I did not try for a full HD video, but it might be possible. The video above is in fact rendered in 720p. Of course the quality is not that great because it is made with low quality clips, but it is possible to do HD with this software.

I was pleased with the rendering speed and the support for h.264. Overall it looks like a good possibility for the price. If you are looking to upgrade from Movie Maker to a nonlinear video editing software, this is for you. If you want to make your home videos spicier without spending a fortune or a lot of time, this is for you.

OVERALL SCORE: 3.5 out of 5

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