Sony Movie Studio Platinum 12 review

Sony’s latest update to its affordable video-editing suite has, bizarrely, dropped the Vegas branding, but with a host of new features including 64-bit support, this cut-price suite is back and better than ever.

The arrival of 64-bit support is welcome and has been a long time coming – it was added to Vegas Pro 9 back in 2009. It’s better late than never, though. Comparing versions 11 and 12, we saw a big jump in the preview performance, up from four to seven simultaneous AVCHD streams without dropping frames. This was with the preview monitor running at 960 x 540 pixels. There was no improvement for 1080p previews, Sony’s latest version managing the same three streams as its predecessor.

Still, Movie Studio makes it easy to adjust preview quality as necessary for smooth playback, and there’s a live frame rate readout to help keep an eye on performance. Seven streams in our standard preview-performance test make it one of the fastest performers at this price. The maximum video and audio track counts have been increased accordingly, up from ten to 20 of each.

According to the feature comparison table on Sony’s website, this version doesn’t include GPU acceleration for effects. Our performance tests suggest otherwise. We imported a 1080p clip from a Canon EOS 5D Mark III and applied three effects – Color Curves, Color Corrector and Gaussian Blur. Preview playback in version 11 came in at around 1fps. Version 12 managed 21fps. There’s an option to disable GPU acceleration in the preferences, so we can confirm that this 2,100% performance boost was entirely down to the GPU. Exports were four times faster, too.

Not all of our test results were this dramatic. Four stacked instances of the Gaussian Blur effect gave a 12-fold improvement, while the Chroma Key effect showed a three-fold improvement. A handful of effects, such as Wave, Pinch/Punch and Film Effects, aren’t accelerated at all. However, there’s no question that the combination of 64-bit code and GPU acceleration amounts to a massive upgrade. Graphics card support is wide, too, thanks to Sony’s use of the OpenCL framework – see the system requirements for full details.

There are some drawbacks to the GPU acceleration. One is that stability suffers a little. We experienced a couple of crashes during testing, and given that Sony has had time to iron out problems with Vegas Pro 11, we suspect that it might be an inevitable downside of harnessing the GPU via OpenCL. We also experienced some visual tearing in the preview monitor when complex effects proved too much even for the GPU acceleration to play smoothly.

This update introduces a feature we’ve been requesting for years: keyframe lanes. Keyframe automation was already reasonably competent, but because keyframes were per effect rather than per parameter, automating multiple parameters in an effect could get messy. Keyframes can now be enabled per parameter, and Bézier curves give precise control over the movement between keyframes.

Not all effects have been upgraded, though – there are several that miss out on GPU acceleration and, sadly, the Pan/Crop editor misses out too. This editor is the only way to make video clips and graphics move around the frame, and it’s crying out for keyframe lanes and Bézier control.

The other improvements can be filed under minor tweaks. There’s a new Split button for people who can’t remember the shortcut key (S). The Trim Start and Trim End buttons are more useful, cropping the selected clip to the current playback position; there are keyboard shortcuts for these commands, too. Some subtle cosmetic changes make it easier to spot the handles that appear on timeline objects, and the buttons on each object have been rearranged so they’re still visible when lots of tracks are shown.

This update adds very little that we haven’t already seen in Vegas Pro 11, but Sony deserves praise for introducing the performance upgrades to its consumer line. Not everyone needs surround sound mixing and 4k support, but everyone benefits from smooth previews. It’s in stark contrast to Adobe, where Premiere Pro and Premiere Elements use different preview engines and the consumer version is significantly inferior.

In truth, Movie Studio Platinum is far from being a consumer-only application. The combination of precise, responsive timeline editing, powerful keyframe automation, sophisticated colour correction and blistering 1080p preview performance means that it’s ready for critical business and creative use, too. For home users, there are other editors that offer more hand-holding, templates and instant results, but Sony’s Movie Studio Platinum 12 puts the user in control and their footage in the spotlight.

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