Like Premiere, Media Studio has no shortage of built-in transitions with over 90 available for the user. The thing that I preferred in Media Studio, however, was the great deal of control that can be exercised over the way transitions operate and the ease with which they can be previewed. The same can be said for the video filtersâ€"Media Studio provides the user with greater scope for fine tuning than does Premiere. It offered slightly fewer video filters (just over 50) and audio filters (around a dozen) than did Premiere.
On the topic of audio, there is another aspect that I preferred in Media Studio related to audio files. When you double-click on an audio file, a window opens up which displays an enlarged view of the audio waveform. In Premieree, this does not happen and you are forced to edit audio by sound alone, or by trying to decipher the small waveform presentation, which appears in the timeline window. With Media Studio however, the waveform can be enlarged to full screen, making it possible to -see" pops and clicks and making it easier to judge certain words and phrases by sight. This was an invaluable feature when setting in and out points on a narration and I miss it now that I am working in Premiere.
As stated earlier, Media Studio bundles a range of sister applications with its editing package. A standalone sound editor can be employed to make editing audio files a breeze. While the aforementioned audio filters can be employed to modify sounds in a variety of ways, the audio editor allows a range of precision effects to be applied. While the package is not of the quality of a fully-fledged audio manipulation tool (such as Sound Forge, for example) it does a very good job. Fades, pitch shifts, reverberation, and resampling can all be achieved quickly and easily and applied at specific cue points along the waveform.
Video Paint is a painting application that also comes with Media Studio. It not only allows you to create or edit a still image, it will import a video file and display the frames along the bottom of the screen. You can move from frame to frame and actually paint onto each frame of the video file to create animated effects (called -rotoscoping"). It has an -onionskin" option that allows previous frames to show through so that animations can also be created in a more -traditional" manner. A range of drawing tools and textures are available for use together with some video filters.
Both Adobe Premiere and Media Studio's video editor have built-in titling modules that allow you to include still or moving titles in any available font or colour and with the ability to have filters and moving paths applied to it. This is clearly adequate for most purposes. However, another application called CG Infinity is also provided with Media Studio. It is a title generator and the options it provides are quite extensive and very impressive and allows for the production of high quality video titling incorporating animated objects as well as text. These vector-based objects can be scaled, rotated and moved along pre-defined paths allowing for very complex titling effects.
All of these functions can be achieved with third-party products but the fact that these applications are included makes Media Studio a very powerful and feature-packed application. Perhaps the paint application falls short of a product like Photoshop (which has the best image manipulation functions I have seen) and the audio editing application doesn't measure up to Sound Forge. But they are free!
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