$200 Movie Makers: Edit your home movies
by Timothy Liebe
You don’t need a Titanic budget to edit and/or archive your home movies. The following titles, all under $200,
let you cut, paste, add titles, transitions, music, narration, and even a special effect or two. We tested the following applications with AVIs captured
using Pinnacle System’s MIROVideo DC10Plus, a $229 Motion-JPEG capture board. Using a 540MHz PII, 128MB RAM, 10GB hard disk and Windows 98, we captured three
sequences at 608 x 456, dropped in two titles and four transitions and timed how long it took each application to render the final movie using both the Studio
DC10Plus’ proprietary M-JPEG compressor and Intel’s Indeo.
IMSI Lumiere
Lumiere is the most powerful and the least expensive NLE app in this roundup, offering most of the features found within Adobe Premiere. We’ve read complaints that Lumiere’s got Premiere’s overhead without its power. While that was true a year ago, Lumiere at that time was being compared to Premiere and Ulead’s Media Studio Pro (two apps that cost $400 more than Lumiere). While it’s still slower than Media Studio and Premiere, it’s the fastest in this roundup, beating the other four contenders by as much as eight
minutes in the render speed test.
Lumiere’s chroma key feature
isn’t as good as Premiere’s, but it’s better than VideoWave II’s. In addition to “Blue Screen” and “Green Screen” (standard keying colors),
there’s also a “Chroma” option that lets you select a keying color from the video with an eyedropper — VideoWave handles it the same way. There
are also “Difference Mattes,” which only include changes between your foreground and background clips. In all cases, there are adjustments for key
smoothing and types of image merging as well as key tolerance (how exact you want the match to the key color to be).
As an added bonus, Lumiere comes with a CD of royalty-free music and a limited version of Sonic Desktop’s SmartSound. This clever applet, which Pinnacle’s DC10Plus also offers, lets you generate
royalty-free music and sound effects for your production. It contains six musical “QuickTracks” and three sound effect QuickTracks.
Each QuickTrack contains several different “styles” with preset tempos, instrumentations and moods. They can also be set to specific lengths which
repeat the basic melody line, then add beginnings and ends. If you’re not satisfied with what’s available, you can purchase additional QuickTracks
from Sonic Desktop at www.smartsound.com.
Our affection for Lumiere doesn’t
blind us to its faults, though. Its clip trimming application is wonky. If you
double-click on the clip in the Project Window, a Video Controller window comes
up complete with Mark In/Out and “Punch” (trim) In/Out icons. Don’t use that to
trim your clip, though, because it won’t trim the audio at the same time! To
trim video and audio together, you have to either drag on the ends of a clip,
or preview it in the Project Window, then use the Punch In/Out controls located
in the Movie Bar along the left-hand side.
Lumiere
also lacks a built-in titler—a major faux pas in our book. As a workaround, they bundled Corel’s PhotoPaint Plus 7. The manual recommends that you
create titles in PhotoPaint Plus with solid color backgrounds, then use the Transparency option to key title over video. This is a clumsy
solution at best.
Video
capture and “building” (rendering) inside the application are both multi-step processes that should be streamlined. For video capture, you not only have to
select capture options beforehand (including frame rate, capture card and audio options), you also have to select both video and audio options after the
capture’s done. To build a video, you first go into Options to select output size, audio settings and frame rate. Next you go to Build, name your clip,
select Compressed video, then Export to start rendering. You don’t get to select which codec to use until after the audio rendering’s over!
These
flaws, along with a pretty steep learning curve prevent Lumiere from receiving a “Kick-Ass” award. However, if you take the time to dig into the
application, you’ll find you can do a lot more than you can with the others.
Maximum PC Verdict: 8
Price
$79.00
Company IMSI
URL www.imsisoft.com
MGI VideoWave II
MGI’s VideoWave II is an
improvement over its predecessor, with new features like “Darkroom” (to tweak
your clips’ brightness, contrast and color), and enhancements on old features
like chromakey and the titler. The manual’s better, too, clearly
explaining how to perform chromakeys and multiple-scene previews.
Unfortunately, MGI hasn’t rethought the overall interface.
VideoWave II uses a storyline
rather than a timeline interface to make editing easier for beginners.
Storylines may be easy, but they’re sure not flexible! Unlike other storyline
applications in this roundup, there’s no timeline interface option that will
let you, say, drop more than one title into a clip.
Moreover, almost every editing function,
even one as basic as clip trimming, has its own separate “Mode.” To perform a
function, you first have to click on the appropriate button on the Mode
Selector. Modes like Title Animator and Video Animator have beginning, middle
and end settings, which must be set separately, unless you’re willing to accept
the defaults.
Because VideoWave II uses a
storyline interface, it’s difficult to time music or narration over more than
one clip. In the 320 x 240 test, we laid in a music track over a three-clip
long introductory sequence using the Audio Studio. The software won’t preview
multiple sequences with music, so it took several tries to get the timing
right. Although you can include multiple sounds within a video clip and even
layer sounds, it’s hard to hit a specific mark with the Audio Studio Control
Panel.
VideoWave II is marketed as an
easy-to-use NLE application for beginners. Though it looks easy at first
glance, the multi-step interface will drive you bananas.
Maximum PC Verdict: 4
Price
$99.00
Company
MGI Software Corp.
URL
www.mgisoft.com
Ulead Video Studio 3.0
Ulead Video Studio 3.0 wants to
beat VideoWave at its own game, and it mostly succeeds. It’s a
decently-designed storyline nonlinear editor that lets Joe Consumer add
transitions, titles, music and narration to his/her home videos. For precision
editing, there’s an optional timeline interface. A feature called “Smart
Render” saves transitions and titles only, so previews and rendering take less
time.
If you’re a novice editor or in a hurry,
you’ll love Video Studio’s “Video Wizard” feature. A “training wheels”
video editor, Video Wizard uses a simplified storyline to walk you through
projects from capture to final creation. There’s limited flexibility (only nine
transitions, and no title keying), but it’s a breeze to use and has a great
clip trimming feature.
There are two ways to trim clips inside Video
Studio itself. The default one makes you drag the Trim Bar in the Preview
window to mark your in-points and out-points, which is frustrating.
Fortunately, there’s a workaround mentioned in the manual which uses the F3 and
F4 keys to mark in-points and out-points. That’s much easier, and the one we
recommend using.
Video Studio lags behind VideoWave
II in a couple areas, though. There are no drop-shadows or outlines on
titles, and only three audio tracks (live video, background music and
narration). Narration can be recorded while previewing, though.
Video Wizard, Smart Render and the
timeline interface option, make Video Studio 3.0 a good bet for
beginning video makers. However, we’d like to see the lack of drop-shadow
titles addressed in the future.
Maximum PC Verdict: 7
Price $99.95
Company Ulead
Systems, Inc.
URL www.ulead.com
Avid’s Avid Cinema
We’re all for ease of use, but we don’t
like being painted into a corner to get it. That’s what Avid Technology, Inc.’s
done with their first consumer NLE application, Avid Cinema. It
only supports six capture cards, three of which have no video output. If you
have a card that Avid Cinema doesn’t recognize, the installer says your
computer doesn’t have the minimum system requirements. There are workarounds
for this, but you’ll have to call Avid Tech Support for them.Avid Cinema’s Edit Movie interface is
limiting. The Trim Handles are supposed to make trimming a video, audio, title
or transition clip easier by letting you drag it to the correct length while
watching the Viewer. However, there’s no project time counter or time bar, so
it’s tough to cut to a specific length. Since that’s the only way to trim, you
can forget splitting a clip. And why aren’t there drop-shadows or outlines on
the titles?
There are limited rendering/output
options. Your sizes are limited to 320x240- or 160x120-pixel QuickTimes or
AVIs, or RealMedia unless your supported video card has 640 x 480 output.
If you have one of the three supported cards without video output or an
unsupported card, you’ll need a scan converter to print to tape.
Avid Cinema does have its good points.
The Storyboard, where you plan and build your projects, is an idea that more
NLE apps should incorporate. It lets you arrange clips and include notes for
shooting or editing, which you can then print out.
It’s hard to believe this product comes
from the company whose name is synonymous with nonlinear editing in Hollywood.
Only beginners would find it useful, and they’ll outgrow it in a hurry.
Maximum PC Verdict: 3
Price $139.00
Company Avid
Technology, Inc.
URL www.avidcinema.com