How to make a multitrack video?

Best Video Editing Software (for effects and format flexibility)?

• There are a pile of "Best Video Editing Software" questions, so I'm going to be very specific. It needs to be less than $150 and below are my primary buying points. - A strong list of special effects, ideally with a community developing other effects and the ability to import these. It must have a "time lag" effect (where you can speed up an hour of footage into a few seconds to make the clouds fly by). - Great versatility in working with different video and audio file formats, e.g. divx, wmv, mov, mp3, wav etc. - Ability to work in widescreen and convert other aspect ratios to and from widescreen. - Multitrack audio with the ability to change the volume levels for specific scenes (can require splitting of the audio feed, as long as it's done in the program). - Stable and well supported As you can see, these are the sort of things it can be tricky to find out off a product website. Thanks.

• Answer:

  Sony's Vegas Movie Studio goes a long way to meeting your requirements, but "a strong list of special effects" is obviously subjective, and VMS doesn't support many third party plugins. It might be worth looking at Pure Motion's EditStudio, which does have a development community. It also supports Wax, so there should be a lot of options available to you.