Video Editing: Digital Director
Review and Guide to Pinnacle Studio 10 Standard Send this article to: Email VideoRaptor has a simple purpose - find and download freely available music and video. With such a simple purpose, you should expect the little application to do what it does well. On initial installation of VideoRaptor, you're presented with an intuitive interface that's geared towards getting you searching for media files as quickly as possible. However, although the layout is logically organised, there isn't a wizard interface to guide you through the process of searching for music and video. And given that VideoRaptor does have a logical work flow process, this is a feature that would have made searching, downloading and converting an absolute breeze.
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Marc Peters takes a look at Magic Bullet Editors 2.0. He fell in love with the original version, but surely an updated product couldn't offer much more than the original. If the promise of real time preview is delivered, he could fall head over heals for this latest version.
Red Giant gave us the holy grail of editing - turning video into film. The original Magic Bullet Editors came with a huge number of film effect filters inspired by Hollywood blockbusters together with tools to give a quirky celluloid look from crisp digital video. Magic Bullet Editors consistently rates as my must have tool. Be it a simple vignette or a diffused look to give instant sex appeal, videos simply don't look complete without the finishing touch of a preset or custom magic bullet filter. How could Red Giant improve Magic Bullet? How could my must-have Premiere plugin be bettered and could the upgrade price be justified? After all, the addition of a few new presets would hardly be a temptation.
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All an editor ever wishes for is software that works and an audience to watch that inspired video. OK, a little praise wouldn't go amiss too. All that's standing in way of ultimate inner harmony is getting your video encoded and actually seen by more people than just your mates. But there's a bewilderingly large amount of options, codecs and 'free' sites that beg you to upload your video and you've got your own website, so why can't you just upload your video there? Well, placing a link to the video is easy enough, but what if you want to stream the video and be almost guaranteed that it will play on any PC. If you've ever tried to stream video, you'll know what a chore this can be. So you may well be interested to know that SWiSH Video2 claims to "convert your video files into streaming Flash files in minutes".
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You've got hours of video tape to edit, but simply no time to spare to sit in front of a PC for at least a day. So the tapes sit gathering dust until you find a whole weekend to cobble together a semi-watchable five minute movie. Even those of us passionate about editing can sometimes find it hard to make the time to for our hobby, so I can imagine how difficult editing can be for the less enthusiastic. What if you didn't have to spend hours labouring over those precise cuts? What if your capture software was fully automated and did all the artistic work for you? This is exactly what muvee autoProducer claims to do.
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I certainly won't claim a world exclusive review of Pinnacle Studio 10. The internet's littered with unfavourable opinions on Studio 10, and that's the very reason I've delayed reviewing the software: I've been too afraid for fear of what it will do to my PC! Lucky for Pinnacle, this kind of publicity hasn't stopped it's products gaining a huge dedicated following, and the software of choice amongst many beginners. So with that in mind, I decided to bury the rumours at the back of my mind and experience Studio 10 for myself. Will the rumours of bugs spoil the day for Pinnacle?
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Premiere Elements shook the video editing market to the core; high end features traditionally reserved for bulging wallets came as standard. Finally we're seeing a move away from the simplistic "storyboard" based editing. But there's one video editing suite that's always pushed the boundaries of low costs video editing applications: Pure Motion Edit Studio.
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"The easier and cheaper a hobby becomes, the more people expect instant results. Talent, flair and enthusiasm become secondary to having the tools." This gem was came from one of our forum moderators, and it's most certainly true for my favoured past time of video editing. Big budget effects and MTV style editing are often the the first items on a newbies list, but not everyone wants an all singing, all dancing home movie. There's just as many camcorder users happy to simply cobble together a few vidoes. Let's not be a snob about this, "video editing" isn't just about creating a movie masterpiece... sometimes it's as simple as removing adverts from TV shows.
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Email From its humble beginings as a hacked version of microsoft's mpeg4 technology, DivX has rapidly grown into a commercially successful product. Originally synonymous with DVD rips (the grey art of copying DVDs), the codec is now widely used in a range of comercial applications. In a recent change of focus for DivXNetworks (the company behind the DivX codec) their recent venture provides the 'complete' package. 'Dr DivX' combines the latest version of their DivX Pro codec with a simple, user friendly encoding application. The price of Dr DivX puts it in diredt competition with entry level video editing packages - editing packages which do everything Dr Divx can do. And With a range of free encoding applications available, we test Dr DivX and its encoding credentials. We also compare Dr DivX to a completely free alternative of VirtualDub plus the Xvid codec.
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"Digital video is not film, you idiot!" This obvious (if pedantic) statement was recently made at videoforums, and conveniently sits as a fitting introduction to this particular guide: film can be spliced, moved and stuck together without requiring ten hours of re-encoding and at exactly the same quality. Do the same with an MPEG file and your stuck with re-encoding, losing your precious time and quality of the final video. Well the guys at VideoRedo are clearly an impatient, quality conscious lot and offer yet another way to bring the world of digital video closer to film.
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