Digital Home Thoughts: Sony Screenblast Movie Studio

"Screenblast® Movie Studio™ software is an easy-to-use editing program from one of Hollywood's leading motion picture studios. It lets you seamlessly capture your video and still images from digital devices, and add effects, transitions, titles and music. It's everything you need to turn your video into memorable movies in minutes.

• Integrated DVD authoring software — Includes over 40 DVD menu templates from the Sony Pictures Digital Authoring Center.
• Improved still-image tools — Red-eye removal wizard.
• Addition of a new 6th track on the timeline — Add text effects to your creations with functionality typically found only in professional software applications.
• NEW Effects — Border, Black Restore, Deform, Lens Flare, Light Rays, Linear Blur, Mirror, Quick Blur, Radial Blur, and Threshold.
• NEW Transitions (Page Peel, Page Roll, Venetian Blinds) — Expands upon Screenblast Movie Studio software's category-leading roster of video effects and transitions.
• "Get Media" button — Easily access hundreds of professionally produced video clips from the Sony Pictures Television library in addition to images, graphics and music from Screenblast.com for use in your projects*
• Increased format support — Support for import, editing, transcoding, and export of Windows Media® 9 video format, AVI's, Macromedia® Flash™ file format (.SWF), MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and other popular formats."

Sony acquired the consumer software division of Sonic Foundry, and in doing so, they got their hands on some of the best video and audio editing software on the planet. This software used to be known as VideoFactory back when Sonic Foundry owned it, and considering it was sub-$100 software, it was quite amazing. I'm not a developer, so it's hard to explain this with any degree of accuracy, but when you use Sonic Foundry products, there was something incredibly sleek and powerful about them. Everything is snappy and responsive, even on humble hardware. It just felt solid, not bloated at all. VideoFactory was a little rough in a few UI departments, but surprisingly powerful. I haven't seen the latest version of ScreenBlast yet, but I can only hope it's just as solid as VideoFactory was!