So if you have a Panasonic 3D-capable camcorder (which do not support 24p), you'll need to mess with the frame rate of your video to master 3D Blu-ray discs. 1080p50 isn't supported by the Blu-ray specification, so we can't blame Sony for that, 720p50 is supported though, but frustratingly absent here. These discs lack menus, though, and some will be frustrated by its lack European compatibility. It's also possible to create fully fledged 3D Blu-ray discs – a first for consumer editing packages.
3D projects are uploaded to YouTube at up to 1080p with the necessary tags so YouTube knows what to do with it.
There's a new effect with a Horizontal Offset slider, which adjusts the left- and right-eye images to bring a clip, text object or other media into or out of the screen. It's all pretty straightforward, with 3D previews either as a red/cyan anaglyph or via a monitor that supports Nvidia 3D Vision or has interlaced polarised lines. Vegas Platinum can now edit footage shot with 3D cameras such as the Fujifilm Finepix Real 3D W3 or the Panasonic HDC-SD90 with its optional 3D lens. Unlike most such effects, it had no problem distinguishing between unwanted shakes, intentional camera pans and moving subjects.3D editing and text animation templates are the headline new features in Vegas Platinum 11 It’s a good one, too, often producing results that resembled Steadicam footage rather than from a bumbling handheld camera. Movie Studio Platinum finally gets a stabilisation effect. Also new is a White Balance effect, which removes colour casts by clicking on a neutral colour in the footage. The Secondary Color Corrector, new to version 10, lets you select a limited range of colours in the footage and process only those areas.
The Color Corrector effect has three colour wheels for shadows, midtones and highlights, as well as the full compliment of gain, offset, saturation and gamma controls. The effects library doesn’t have the pizzazz of some of its rivals but its corrective tools are much more sophisticated. Corel VideoStudio X3 just copes with two and Premiere Elements 8 only manages one stream. However, even Movie Studio Platinum’s four streams are a considerable improvement on most other low cost editors.
Best of all is Adobe Premiere Pro CS5’s revamped 64-bit engine, which manages ten streams. Sadly, Movie Studio Platinum isn’t available as a native 64-bit application – Vegas Pro is, and it managed six AVCHD streams on the same PC. On our Core i7 test PC, the software managed to play four simultaneous AVCHD streams at this setting. Half the full resolution is a good compromise for 1080p footage. Movie Studio Platinum lets you offset preview resolution against smoothness, so simple sequences can be viewed at full resolution, while complex, effects-laden ones might use a lower resolution to avoid dropped frames.
Being able to preview edits as soon as you’ve made them is essential, but the high demands of HD formats, particularly AVCHD, mean editors often drop frames during playback, making it hard to preview works in progress. The look and feel of HD Platinum 11 was very similar to 9.0, so I was able to get up and running right away. I have used it on three projects now and have been very happy with the results. It helps that the preview engine is efficient, too. Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 11 Production Suite Old Version seemed to fit the bill.