I have tried a lot of video-editing applications, both consumer and "pro" — Avid, Pinnacle, Premiere (and Premiere Elements), Ulead — and none of them can hold a candle to Sony’s Vegas family, which includes Vegas Pro and Vegas Movie Studio.

It’s a shame that Pinnacle Studio and Adobe Premiere Elements are the two big names that come up when you talk about consumer video editing (aside from iMovie and Window Movie Maker, both of which are free).

Pinnacle is absolute crap. Flotsam. Garbage. It’s not about the dumbed-down interface; the thing just doesn’t work. Read the message boards and you’ll see they’re full of complaints about slow performance and frequent lockups.

Premiere is better, for sure, but compared to Vegas it’s overly complex and certainly unintuitive.

I’m not a video-editing pro by any means, and I don’t intend to be one. But I do like to take my videos and make them a bit better. I add titles and simple transitions (fancy transitions, to me, are a mark of an amateur) and edit hour long videos down to five minutes.

But occasionally I get a bit fancy — I’ll add still photos, or dub in a sound, or do a picture in picture. And I want doing those things to make sense.

With Vegas they do. (Vegas is the pro product; most of you will want Vegas Movie Studio which sells for about $100 — the same as the other consumer editors.)

Most video editors are similar. You have your timeline where you drop and arrange the clips that make up your movie, you have a preview window, you have a list of clips, and so on.

The first nice thing I discovered about Vegas is how it handled transitions. If you have two clips next to each other on the timeline, you simply drag one so it overlaps the other by a few frames (or more). You automatically get a crossover transition — one fades out as the other fades in.

With crossovers and fade-to-black being the most common and useful transition, this makes things really easy. (With Premiere you put the clips next to each other, the make your way through the video transitions lists and sub-lists until you find the crossover, then you drag it between the clips. For a feature you use a lot it’s really annoying.)

All of Vegas is like that: Clean and intuitive. Sure, there’s a learning curve. You’ll have one with any video editor. But so much about Vegas is done right that the curve isn’t that steep. (And unlike Pinnacle or Ulead products, you don’t feel like you’re being treated like an idiot.)

Vegas has a gadzillion features that I won’t bother to list, from HD support to a huge list of output formats, to tons of plugins.

If you want to get into video editing beyond Windows Movie Maker (which isn’t bad, to be honest), Sony Vegas Movie Studio is the way to go. You can even download a 30-day free trial if you don’t believe me.

Sony Vegas Movie Studio: About $70-$129 depending on version