I'm shooting public events with a simple camcorder and want to output to DVD and YouTube. I've a system with 1gb RAM, 2Ghz proc, 250gb HD space and an AGP GEForce 6200 with 256mb. This is what I'm looking for:
basic transitions: crossfade, fades, wipes. I don't need funky or wacky 3D junk.
titling: font choice, kerning, leading, skewing, etc. Add background solids, gradients, and graphics. Animate titling graphics and lettering with fades, blinds, crawls, etc.
video effects: time stretch, motion blur, frame blending
color correction: hue, saturation, low/mid/high balance, gamma, black and white points with levels, curves, etc.
effects per clip
effects per track (great for mass color correction)
timeline editing: multi camera angles, simple A/B/C switching, sync and group video streams to audio track(s)
automation graphs. keyframe velocity.
A sleek UI. Ableton Live is my favorite app because it is powerful, yet has a simple UI.
I've demo'd a few apps and found some shortcomings with them - Premiere Pro doesn't support MPG2 as source footage and Vegas retains the same cluttered UI and scattered functions between menus as all the Sony (Sonic Foundry) products.
At the moment (a short moment, I hope), I'm using Pinnacle Studio and I like the simple UI, but it has a few bugs, is a bit slow, and is lacking some features. Any suggestions?
