This is not a tirade against MS4. I've been using this product since it was Video Factory 2.0 and for the money nothing I've seen can touch it. But I recently decided to take a look at what else was out there and came across a glowing review of Pinnacle Studio 9. So I downloaded it, played with it for half an hour and deleted it. While it may have functionality that is missing in MS, it is a toy, aimed at consumers (I see MS as a 'prosumer' product). So I purchased the upgrade from MS3 to MS4. Best $30 I ever spent, if only to get DVD AS (even though I already had DVD-lab).
But my evaluations/research of other tools has convinced me that MS4 is missing a few obvious features that other products in this price range offer, namely:
Automatic color correction. Believe it or not, pros aren't the only ones that want to automatically clean up their video. And consumers aren't going to shell out $500 for Vegas 5 to do so.
Improved slide show capabilities. While slide shows can be produced with MS4, anything beyond simple transitions and pans & zooms are a hassle. Again, Vegas 5 is better, but my guess is most 'pros' aren't making slide shows. Even Microsoft's FREE Photo Story 3 has a feature to pan and zoom from one slide to the next while retaining the previous slide's settings. I can do this with MS4 but it's painful.
Automatic crossfades for multiple images added to the timeline. Crossfading more than a few dozen images, each with, say, a 1 second transition, is a lot more painful than it needs to be.
(Slideshow capabilities are, in my opinion, pretty weak in MS. The sad thing is, so little needs to be done feature-wise to make it outstanding for this purpose).
Textual entry of transition timing. If anyone has found a way to specify the starting point of a transition and its length, without using the slider method, please let me know. But getting an exact transition timing requires zooming in on the timeline and sliding edges around. This works but it is less than user-friendly. Two boxes could be added to the 'Transition Properties' dialog, 'Starting Time' and 'Length', that would make this infinitely easier to use.
Nothing I've mentioned would cause me to switch to something else but I know Sony reads these posts so I'm hoping that some of these things will be considered for future versions. There's so many things right about this product that if some of the above things could be addressed, MS would literally have no competition.
Bruce
But my evaluations/research of other tools has convinced me that MS4 is missing a few obvious features that other products in this price range offer, namely:
Automatic color correction. Believe it or not, pros aren't the only ones that want to automatically clean up their video. And consumers aren't going to shell out $500 for Vegas 5 to do so.
Improved slide show capabilities. While slide shows can be produced with MS4, anything beyond simple transitions and pans & zooms are a hassle. Again, Vegas 5 is better, but my guess is most 'pros' aren't making slide shows. Even Microsoft's FREE Photo Story 3 has a feature to pan and zoom from one slide to the next while retaining the previous slide's settings. I can do this with MS4 but it's painful.
Automatic crossfades for multiple images added to the timeline. Crossfading more than a few dozen images, each with, say, a 1 second transition, is a lot more painful than it needs to be.
(Slideshow capabilities are, in my opinion, pretty weak in MS. The sad thing is, so little needs to be done feature-wise to make it outstanding for this purpose).
Textual entry of transition timing. If anyone has found a way to specify the starting point of a transition and its length, without using the slider method, please let me know. But getting an exact transition timing requires zooming in on the timeline and sliding edges around. This works but it is less than user-friendly. Two boxes could be added to the 'Transition Properties' dialog, 'Starting Time' and 'Length', that would make this infinitely easier to use.
Nothing I've mentioned would cause me to switch to something else but I know Sony reads these posts so I'm hoping that some of these things will be considered for future versions. There's so many things right about this product that if some of the above things could be addressed, MS would literally have no competition.
Bruce