Like Sony's Vegas Pro 10, Movie Studio HD Platinum 11 offers GPU acceleration for encoding to Sony's .avc format; Sony says that "traditional projects suggest up to 20 percent improvement" in rendering speed. Sony also says that it works not only with "select" Nvidia-based graphics cards, but also with select ATI cards. I saw an average boost of about 18 percent, which is certainly welcome, but it pales in comparison to the orders-of-magnitude boost provided by . Furthermore, Movie Studio HD Platinum 11 accelerates only a single function--compared to Premiere Pro's nearly application-wide acceleration. For Sony to boast about its GPU acceleration is like Chevrolet crowing about a new model having eight-spoke wheels instead of seven-spoke ones.

What's Your Title?

A new Titles and Text dialog makes adding animated titles fairly easy. For example, you add your text in a dialog box (not directly on your video canvas, unfortunately) where you specify your preferred font and size, and select from several different style settings, including outlines, shadows, line spacing, and tracking. You can also specify the text's location on the canvas, as you watch a live preview of it--but you can do the same thing by dragging it around the Preview window. You can adjust the size of the text either by increasing the font size in the dialog box or by dragging on handles at the corners of the text box. But if you do the latter, instead of causing the font size measurements to increase, it enlarges a "scale" setting. I found that significantly increasing the size sometimes resulted in fuzzy text.

Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 11 is a complex application, even for a consumer-grade video editor, with many powerful tools that will please more-advanced users and intimidate newbies. That in itself isn't a criticism--I usually recommend that people suck it up and learn how to use more-capable products rather than choosing dumbed-down alternatives--but Sony doesn't do nearly as much as Adobe does to make its consumer-grade video editor accessible to people who aren't familiar with it. True, Movie Studio HD Platinum offers helpful Show Me How tutorials that lead the way by opening up the proper dialog boxes and highlighting commands--but the topics covered are the most basic ones, not the ones that will vex people who've moved beyond the basics.

Also, some included features--such as the new ability to add audio effects at the bus level (meaning, delivering the effect to external hardware)--seem unnecessary in a consumer-grade product. If you're connecting external audio hardware to your video-editing system, you probably aren't using a $100 application to edit video. At the same time, Sony devotes a special command in the Tools menu to outputting video for playback on a Sony PlayStation Portable, instead of sticking that function in the Make Movie settings. In the scheme of things, neither the external audio option nor PSP output feel necessary here.