We all tend to look through things with rose-coloured glasses sometimes. I'm going to make some recommendations BUT if you have a program you already use and like then STICK WITH IT. There's no point in spending extra money for a "better editing program" if what you have keeps you happy.
Scenario 1; The Budget is tight.
Lets face it, when thinking about RC plane videos, video editing is a side pursuit to flying. Every dollar you spend on a video editor and a computer to do it is a dollar less than you can spend on your planes.
Windows Live Movie Maker is the clear winner being free and working fine on any windows-based system. Vegas is a good runner-up though. It's got a nice and rounded set of features that allows you to take things a step further and make your videos look different to so many others using WLMM for their Youtube videos.
Scenario 2; Throw together a Video and get it up on Youtube.
The 2 clear-cut winners here are Windows Live Movie Maker and Cyberlink PowerDirector. Both are exceptionally easy to use for the basics of cutting together your video, adding a title, throwing in some transitions, adding some music and uploading it onto youtube. Powerdirector offers a much wider variety of titles and transitions if you shoose to make your own but both offer to quickly and easily add a theme to your movie that adds titles and transitions on your behalf with only the text to be filled in.
Scenario 3; Add a little flair to your videos
Powerdirector, Vegas and Premiere Elements all allow you to do this, just to differing degrees of personal skill level and computer specs. Powerdirector is probably the best "all round" but each of the others also have their advantages to make them desirable. All will zoom and stabilize, have a variety of titles and transitions and a healthy range of effects to choose from.
Scenario 4; The family will want to use it too.
The results are just a backup of scenario 2. Both WLMM and PowerDirector are easy enough to use that the whole family can get in on the action to varying degrees. Not only will both do your plane videos they will also do the vacation videos, easily create slideshows from digital stills, etc. The main difference in this area is that Powerdirector has event-specific titles on offer, lighting correction to help you spiff up those videos that came out a little dark and more in the way of effects that the kids will want to play with.
Scenario 5; You are looking to build video making into a hobby of it's own rather than just a sideline to your RC.
Adobe Premiere Elements is the winner here IF you can afford a computer to run it well. The range of options and features is just far superior to the other 3 offerings.
PowerDirector and Vegas are both close runner-ups but I'd go with a better version of vegas than the stock. Each has it's own advantages but the main one they have in common is the ability to run on lower-end computers. Both of these run well on my setup which isnt' really designed around video editing.
To bring my computer up to spec to run Premiere Elements well I'm looking at a better CPU, more ram and cleaning up my hard drives. Overall I'm looking at about $350 for this upgrade to do "ok". The only upgrade most people would need to run PowerDirector or Vegas on the average desktop computer is a video card with hardware video encoding to speed up the process. You dont[' need anything flash and there's offerings from both nVidia (gForce) and AMD (Radeon) that will do the job admirably for $140-$160 easy enough.
My opinion?
Based on making RC plane videos quickly and easily so you can show off via the internet?
Free; Windows Live Movie Maker. Honestly speaking? For a good 95% of people this is all you are going to need in order to cut out the bits you don't want, put together the bits you do want and get your video online.
Paid; Look, I would LOVE to recommend PowerDirector, I really would. At $20 more than Vegas it's worth it just for being so easy to use. There's nothing "wrong" with Vegas at all it's just that PowerDirector is by FAR easier to use for 95% of everything you will likely find yourself doing with it. The issue of it not wanting to work with multiple high-def files just makes it so I can't. Sony Vegas therefore wins that race.
It's more fiddly to use but it's still a powerful piece of kit that allows you to get your video onto youtube with the minimal of fuss.
Do NOT buy Peemiere Elements unless you intend to get much deeper into video editing and have the money to splash out on a computer to run it. Just because your computer runs games blisteringly fast it doesn't necessarily mean it will push Premiere Elements either. If Adobe could wrap their heads around using video cards more effectively I would have little trouble recommending this over Vegas. As it stands though, Vegas is far better for the average user if you want to take your first steps into a more professional-type setup for video editing.
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