Ease Of Use

How fast is it to get up and running?

Here, Premiere Elements clearly has an advantage. As a ‘prosumer’ tool, it expects to give you a helping hand with features like trying to automatically make the video for you and presenting tools in terms of tasks rather than simply burying them. That said, if you switch it into Expert mode, it will mostly get out of your way. Its big brother, Premiere Pro, is unsurprisingly faster if you know what you're doing, though it does expect you to learn. In the middle, Final Cut Pro finds a good compromise. It’s a sleek, modern approach whose philosophies will be familiar after using other Apple tools, and its specific tools tend to be a fraction easier to use. The aforementioned colour correction is a good example: it’s split into colour, saturation and exposure, even if it is tucked out of the way. Lightworks is unusual, but easily grasped. On the other side of the expertise curve, Avid is for professionals and professionals only, while poor Jahshaka again struggles to combine its tools with ease of use.