Hi, I'm not sure if this is the right section to post this, but I was wondering would educational software be a good route for a student filmmaker to take?

I, for example, am very interested in getting software like AVID Xpress Studio HD Complete and Discreet 3DSMax. The only thing that is holding me back is that I hear that you can't use educational versions for anything but learning the software and using them for commercial use is a no no.

What about internet videos like the ones posted all the time?

What if I make a movie that winds up in film festivals and gets picked up by some big company, let's just say Miramax for example, and they want to put it in theatres and all the while I used educational versions of software to edit and add effects? Highly unlikely but what if?

There's been some discussion of this before which might be of interest:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=20161
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=8213
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=13839
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=4504

What if I make a movie that winds up in film festivals and gets picked up by some big company, let's just say Miramax for example, and they want to put it in theatres and all the while I used educational versions of software to edit and add effects? Highly unlikely but what if?My question is this: how on earth can anyone tell from watching a movie whether or not you used educational software?

I'm not advocating violating any user agreements. I'm just curious to know how they could possibly enforce this. It seems pretty silly.

If you're concerned about it, there are low cost versions (Sony's Vegas lite should be good if it's anything at all like Vegas) you can use to do pretty much any kind of editing you want. And the Open Source guys are already producing free compositing and editing software.