Nero Video Premium HD review

It takes a brave company to remove features in a software release, but that’s precisely what Nero has done with its latest multimedia package. After years of piling on feature after feature, software widget after software widget, it’s finally decided to pare things down with Nero Video Premium HD. Even the name is straightforward.

For once, we needn’t spend half the review listing new additions: Video Premium HD has just one major component – the Nero Vision Xtra video-editing tool – and supplements this with a couple of well-chosen extras. These are CinePlayer, which comes complete with a Blu-ray disc playback plugin, and MediaHub, a media browser and management application. The whole lot costs £60 inc VAT – good value considering the Blu-ray playback feature on its own would set you back around £30.

Don’t expect Nero Vision Xtra to offers masses of features, bells or whistles, though. There’s no 3D support, as offered by Roxio Creator 11 and Magix Movie Edit Pro 17 Plus, and the core video-editing tools feel rudimentary in comparison to our A List favourite, Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum (now around £44 inc VAT).

The timeline editing tools, in particular, are limited. With other editors, you simply manipulate handles on the tracks themselves to adjust fades, transitions and so on, but with Vision Xtra you have to fade audio in and out using keyframes, which is slower and more frustrating.

More critically, there are no ripple effects options. You can delete a clip and have Nero Vision close the gap for you, but move it or truncate a clip in the middle of a complex sequence and, to eliminate the resulting gap in your project, you’ll have to select the following clips manually and drag them into place. That could turn out to be a pain if you need to perform fundamental edits in the middle of a long, complicated wedding movie, for instance. Audio editing, meanwhile, is limited to noise reduction and level adjustments.