Sony Vaio Movies including MovieShaker and Click to DVD

Not For Sale (Pre-installed on Sony Vaio desktops and laptops) sony.com/vaio

While not on par with Apple, the Vaio home-movie suite has everything you need to turn out a decent home movie. Movie Shaker's actual editing tools are very similar to iMovie: a clip chart, plus a timeline and a place for additional music. Like iMovie, you can choose transitions and special effects, plus add text or even a voice-over narration. MovieShaker even lets you run up to nine special effects per scene. The trouble is, the animated effects are often cheesy, or too specific to be useful (bubbles, caution sign). On the flipside, MovieShaker's scene transitions were generally useful (cross fade, wipe right), but there are comparatively few to choose from. Once my three-and-a-half-minute movie was finished, I had to save it as something called a 4Mbps MPEG-2 file, and I only knew to do this by carefully reading the fine print underneath the 12 equally scary sounding options. Once the file was converted to MPEG — which in general takes about three times as long as the movie itself — I was ready to "Click to DVD."

Click to DVD is the name of Sony's elegant DVD creator. You begin the four-step process by choosing a theme — that is, a title page that's already laid out, awaiting your text and video clips. There are 10 motion themes, and many more static themes. Once you choose one, you either bring in your saved MPEG file, or add video straight from the camcorder. (There is a limited video-editing tool inside Click to DVD.) If you are so inclined, step 3 allows you to add a (very nice) photo slide show, and then, when you get to step 4, you name everything, play around with fonts, preview the title page, and burn your disc. By the third time you've done it, you'll be a pro. My only major complaint is that the text on the title page and video menu appeared quite low-resolution when I viewed my freshly made DVD on a computer monitor. It took away from the professionalism.

Bottom Line: The tools Sony provides would be great in the hands of a third-grade teacher or a design genius. My project came out fine, but it was hard to avoid cheesy effects.