Professional Editor Reviews - Editing Features

Corrective Filters

Adobe Premiere Pro

Apple Final Cut Pro

AVID Xpress DV Pro

Pinnacle Liquid Edition Pro

Sony Vegas 6

Filter interface in general

Better for advanced users than beginners, but once you're up to speed you'll really like the precision and straightforward nature of the controls.

Most controls allow you to enter numbers (for ease of replication) or use a slider. You can also insert key frames for each parameter independent of others, which delivers a great deal of precision.

On the other hand, the controls are not touchy/feely for beginners.

Very much like Adobe Premiere Pro, except that Adobe gives you more data entry options. For example, in the motion controls, Adobe gives you the ability to drag an item to the desired location, insert a value in a control or use a slider to choose a value. Apple often lacks that third option, which can be helpful when you only want to adjust an item's location in mone dimension.

Otherwise, you have access to most applied filters in one scrolling screen (like Adobe), so you don't have to close one to open another, as you do with Edition, Vegas and Xpress DV. This makes it simpler to adjust multiple filters during the same editing pass.

Working with multiple filters is complicated and often requires that you render an effect to apply another.  You control each filter separately, which complicates some adjustments, though Avid takes a kitchen sink approach with some filters, including all relevant adjustments to simplify the process.

You set filter parameters in a separate mode that's different for each filter. Often, this means exiting one mode to open another which is not as convenient as Premiere Pro's approach where you can easily access and adjust all filters at any time. Perhaps for this reason, most Edition filters tend to be very comprehensive. For example, the 2D Editor GPU includes position, size, rotation and transparency (like Premiere Pro) and also Corner Curve, Border, Shadow and Cropping, all either not available in Premiere or separate filters. 

Pinnacle adds complexity by asking the user to choose and balance filters driven by the GPU (graphics processing unit) and CPU. This presents the user with multiple choices for many common effects (like 2D Editor GPU and CPU below), asking them to perform load balancing between the two components.

For the most part, unless you're doing incredibly complex, multilayered effects, you can safely ignore this distinction with little or no impact on system performance.

You apply each filter separately in a "chain" configuration. This makes it a bit tougher to adjust multiple filters, but Sony compensates by throwing many adjustments into a single filter (like brightness adjustments in the color correction filter).

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Good ability to toggle filters on and off to see before and after views and determine optimal parameters for one or all filters.

Can adjust all filters in the same panel and easily toggle them on and off.

Yes- preliminarily, we noted that the computer monitor seemed brighter than the television; much more so than any other program.

Preview on the timeline after rendering, but not when setting filter parameters.

Adobe Premiere Pro

Apple Final Cut Pro

AVID Xpress DV Pro

Pinnacle Liquid Edition Pro

Sony Vegas 6

We used Premiere Pro's Shadow/ Highlight filter "off the rack," meaning no adjustments, which was fast and produced the best quality in the roundup.

On longer clips, however, we noticed some flicker when the automatic adjustment was applied (our test clips were too short to really detect this, but when we actually created the project from which the tests were derived, we saw the flicker). If you use this filter on a long clip, apply it to a thirty second segment, render and see if you can notice flickering. If you do, use the manual adjustments (with key frames if necessary) rather than the auto adjustment.

Color adjustment tools were all manual, and lacking some of the niceties provided by competitors, like split screen view.

No real way to adjust selectively in the image. Used brightness and contrast controls with just OK results. Nice to have an adjustable split screen control for viewing the effect of the effect.

Liquid doesn't have any filters targeted at underexposed video. You can kind of get there with the Classic Color Correction filter that lets you adjust luminance values for shadows, mid tones and highlights, but the controls are very intimidating to all but video engineers. Liquid trailed Premiere Pro here for both usability and output quality.

No tool lets you target brightness values for different levels in the clip. You have to use standard brightness and contrast controls which produced substandard result in Party clip, OK result in Clown.

Adobe Premiere Pro

Apple Final Cut Pro

AVID Xpress DV Pro

Pinnacle Liquid Edition Pro

Sony Vegas 6

In addition to the auto tool, Premiere Pro offers both RGB and HSL controls which can be very helpful for some clips.

Color balance is a nice tool because it sorts out colors by shadows, mid tones and highlights, which feels a bit much at first  but quickly adds a lot of value.

The controls worked very well on some clips if you had either an absolute black or absolute white area in a frame to select (as with our blue and pink tinted clips). On others, (brown and yellow) they had little effect, forcing the user to go completely manual.  Of course, the automatic controls on the other program didn't work that well on these clips, so the result isn't that out of line.

With the yellow and brown clips, we used the RGB Balance filter, which provided adjustments for the three primary colors in highlights, midtones and blacks, which is a wonderful level of control (most programs provide overall RGB adjustments, which is less flexible).

FCP could use an automatic color correction feature, but overall, the toolset offered produced very good results. 

Color correction is a big tool with auto and manual adjustments (including Gain and Gamma) in RGB and HSL spaces, as well as a split screen view.

Operation is funky, however, as are many effect related operations in Xpress. For example, if you split one long clip on the timeline using the Add Edit command (essentially a split), then apply color correction to the first split clip, Avid applies the correction to the total clip, making it tough to customize values for different sections of the clip.

To get around this, we imported each segment one at a time from the source window (there may be a workaround; we didn't ask).

Also, if you apply color correction to one clip atop another (say in a PiP or layering application, Avid applies the color correction to both. There is a workaround to this using the Step In key, which isolates the top clip in a separate Timeline.

Operation clearly worth it here, however, as AVID clearly had the best color correction of all.

The three wheels in the control represent high, low and mid tones, and you can adjust them by sliding the circle in the color wheel, selecting "Complimentary" or "Adjustment" colors with the eyedroppers or adjusting the Angle and Magnitude. Generally, the first mode is simplest; you just drag the circle away from the dominant color.

We like that Saturation, Gamma, Gain and Offset controls are included, and the ability to split the display screen to better view the results of our efforts (uncorrected below is on the left; corrected on the right). Still, we'd prefer automatic color correction controls.

The big concern with Vegas (and most manual tools) is that you end up going overboard and making your video look like colorized movies.

Yes - in main color correction tool only - not auto tool.

Yes - in main tool (but very comprehensive)

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Adobe Premiere Pro

Apple Final Cut Pro

AVID Xpress DV Pro

Pinnacle Liquid Edition Pro

Sony Vegas 6

Pretty garish control, but it works very well in automatic mode.  You do have to render the effect before previewing in real time, which is fine.

Final Cut has good controls for image stabilization, including the ability to manually track objects with key frames.  In the image below, for example, I tracked the upper left hand corner of the woman's ID badge every 15 frames or so throughout the ten second clip.

Unfortunately, the effort isn't worth it, since the final videos are overly jittery, with black spaces around the frames. 

To customize image stabilization, you select the part of the image to remain stable (called "region of interest) and then click Auto Zoom so the software zooms into the image to eliminate the edges of the video potentially exposed by moving the image around to keep it stable.

This worked very, very well in two of three videos, where the video in the frame did not change that dramatically (shooting a tour guide in a moving bus and shooting a concert onstage with a handheld camera). However, when applying to footage shot while walking alongside a parade (where the complete background shifted dramatically), the software tended to really zoom in on the subject, eliminating much of the background image. The high zoom ratio, compounded with the adjustments inherent to image stabilization, tended to degrade video quality in these applications.

Vegas uses the image stabilization tools from Boris FX Limited. As bundled, this is accomplished in a separate utility, though you can pay more and get a plug-in that works within Vegas. Since most of our issues are workflow related, that may make sense.

The standalone application is primitive. You'll have to start by capturing in Vegas, exporting only the regions that you want to stabilize, exporting those as DV files, then import them into Boris. In other programs, you simply split the segment you want to stabilize and apply the filter. 

You can't just import a file and start working, you have to set duration, set resolution and set field order. You may know the field order of DV off the top of your head, and maybe I should, but this forced me to guess (upper?  lower?) and then redo everything to ensure the results were correct.  Then, of course, you have to output the result into a DV file you can re-import back to Vegas, adding another generation to your video. Of course, there is no DV preset - that would be too easy. So, you have to work your way through the various encoding options to try and find one; or export raw files, at 32 MB/second or so.

All this on top of the fact that you have to learn how to use a separate application to get all this work done, rather than simply applying a filter. Thank goodness that the Boris manual has some useful exercises.

Other than that, Ms. Lincoln, how was the play? Boris work like After Effects; you can either point it to a stable element in the video and let it track it through the video, or manually create key frames and keep pointing the cursor at that object.

During stabilization, the frames can move significantly around the video window, moving part of the frame off camera leaving open spaces in the video window. Where most programs zoom into the stabilized frame to present a complete frame, Boris doesn't appear to. While you can zoom in in Vegas, the adjustments made by Boris were too radical, with some frames moving across nearly half the frame image (and leaving the other half blank). You'd need to zoom in almost 100% to compensate.

Other programs seem to reach a good compromise between stabilization and the amount of required zoom, usually stabilizing within about a 20-30% zoom region.

Overall, a very powerful feature that's very difficult to usefully harness.

Quality was very good, minimizing the shakes with little obvious zooming and no gross artifacts.

Results were mixed. In addition to the zoom issue discussed above, it appears that we might have gotten the frame order incorrect, resulting in overly jittery video. On one clip, with limited motion, the filter did a wonderful job.  Definitely promise here, but like you in your jobs, we have a limited time to make things work.  Sony/Boris need to make things easier.