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Pure Motion EditStudio 4

Can a British software company take on the big boys in the budget video editing arena and hope to succeed? Well, that's just what Pure Motion is trying to do with V4.1 of EditStudio

The first time we looked at the Windows budget analogue/DV editing program EditStudio from Stockport-based Pure Motion, it was at version 2.1 and, though reasonably functional, it had a few teething problems. We revisited the program at V3 and were sufficiently impressed to give it a Good Value award for its array of upmarket features. Now, we're looking at the latest iteration, V4.1, to see what progress has been made.
One area where things haven't moved on much is the packaging - the boxed version we were sent (£90 inc VAT) looks uninspiring and isn't going to win any awards for design - though that may not matter as long as sales remain restricted to Pure Motion's web site, rather than retail stores.
Pure Motion offers various tasters on its website. These include a 30-day trial version of the editor (14.6MByte download) and the opportunity to use with it V1.3.1 of Media Chance's impressive authoring program DVD-lab. Media Chance's program can then be bought at a reduced price of £49 with a valid EditStudio User ID code. The total for a full editing and DVD authoring solution would be £139 or £159 if bought with a two-port OHCI FireWire card.

Conclusion
EditStudio 4 is packed full of useful features and easy to use, even when applying keyframes and creating picture-in-picture effects. Its new FireWire preview option is a welcome addition - as are widescreen editing and export - and its on-screen previewing is hugely improved.
What we'd like to see in the next version, though, is real-time previewing in the trimming window - the absence of this hinders frame-accurate editing. It would also be good if chapter markers could be carried over into DVD-lab.
Although two less-expensive editing competitors - Pinnacle Studio 9 and Ulead VideoStudio 7 - offer DVD authoring as standard, EditStudio is undoubtedly excellent value in all its variants. The £90 version includes Main Concept's highly respected MPEG encoder - which alone costs £90 - while the £139 version further adds the excellent DVD-lab, which sells for US$99.
We hope that Pure Motion's program enjoys the level of sales it deserves, but worry that the marketing muscle of its competitors will continue to leave Edit Studio overshadowed, and mean that a lot of potential users will miss out.

Lisa Keddie

Read the full review in May 2004's Computer Video magazine.

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Reviewed in this issue:

Pinnacle ShowCenter
Canon MVX3i
CyberLink PowerProducer 2.0
Magix Movies on CD & DVD 2.0
Pure Motion EditStudio 4
Shining CitiDisk DV
Ulead DVD Workshop 2
Wacom Graphire 3 Studio XL

In this issue's news:

Video Forum 2004
Task-centric Creator 7
Apple GarageBand
Cut-price Canon cams
Desktop spanning over a network
Affordable rostrum camera software