digital video editing - Software Review - Hardware Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Jan, 2001 by Dave Johnson

Today, every business owner can be a filmmaker

FOR MANY HOME BUSINESSES, THE recent digital video (DV) phenomenon has been every bit as empowering as the desktop publishing revolution of a decade ago. It's not hard to see why: You can easily capture high-quality video from a relatively affordable camcorder, edit the footage on an ordinary desktop PC, and publish the finished product at full broadcast quality. Such mini-movies are often the perfect complement to a presentation, speech, marketing handout, or instructional video.

The convergence of several key technologies has accelerated the desktop DV boom. FireWire (also known as IEEE 1394) interfaces capture video from digital camcorders and quickly transfer it to your PC. Today's huge, fast hard disks have brought the sky-high storage and transfer-speed demands of video editing down to earth. And the Web is available to display streaming movies online--a great alternative to mastering old-fashioned videotapes.

We tested five DV editing packages that cater to a variety of users. Some of these, like Pinnacle's StudioDV, are bundled with their own video hardware, while MGI's VideoWave 4 is a standalone software program that works with most FireWire adapters. Apple's iMovie and Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker are bundled with new Mac systems and Windows Me, respectively.

Due to this variety, we didn't test all these packages on a single hardware system, though for Windows video editors we recommend at least a fast Pentium II with 128MB of memory and 12GB of available hard disk space (more is better). With each program, we created a simple 5-minute movie that featured transitions, titles, and a few special effects. We then published the finished movies to a variety of formats, including MPEG, the Web, and back to videotape (depending on each editing program's output options).

Apple iMovie 2.0

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The $999 iMac DV with standard FireWire interface and iMovie software is a dramatic demonstration of how easy and accessible multimedia authoring can be for the home office.

The Apple software's simple interface belies its power. The program automatically breaks up your videotape into logical scenes during the capture process; it was the only editor that didn't split one tricky scene of our test video in half. We also liked the presence of both time line and storyboard interfaces, and though the number of transitions is limited, the program has outstanding titling capabilities.

Videos made with iMovie needn't look--or sound--ordinary. You can choose from a library of special effects such as sepia hues, soft focus, and even animated ripples, and there's no practical limit to the number of audio tracks you can add. We could save our finished movies back to DV tape or in Apple's Web- and QuickTime format.

Despite its elegance, iMovie isn't right for every home office. Not only does the program make no pretense of being a Hollywood-caliber editing package like Adobe Premiere, but the iMac's 15-inch screen is too small for anyone who'll be incorporating video into Web sites or presentations on a daily basis. Also, the system is oddly incompatible with many camcorders. That said, iMovie is a friendly solution for short business videos as well as family movies, and a nice bonus for users buying into the Mac platform.

[pros] Free with iMac DV; user-friendly

[cons] Not powerful enough for business

Digital Origin IntroDV

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Ease of use is a highlight of many of the DV editing solutions here, but what you see isn't always what you get. IntroDV's toolbar, for instance, walks you through the editing process like an assembly line, but there's no toolbar entry for working with audio. And IntroDV doesn't have automatic scene detection, so we had to save our scenes from video manually.

IntroDV renders every element of your movie into a DV-writeable format as it's entered into the time line, instead of all at once at the end. While this sounds nice in theory--you're always ready to publish your movie--we found it infuriating and slow in practice.

IntroDV is also far more limited than its competitors. The titling module, for instance, makes it difficult to preview fonts or change the size of text. The package offers just 10 transitions, and while they're good ones, you can't modify their duration until after the annoying "instant render" phase.

The package comes with a FireWire card, though we had trouble getting it to work in our test PC. While IntroDV renders movies in DV, AVI, and QuickTime formats, it lacks MPEG or RealPlayer output rendering. Overall, despite a few bright points, we find it difficult to recommend IntroDV to even the casual video editor.

[pros] Supports DV, AVI, and QuickTime

[cons] Manual audio and video controls

MGI VideoWave 4

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Newly equipped with a more professional interface that makes much better use of screen real estate, VideoWave is an easy favorite. MGI's program doesn't use wizards or easy-to-follow tabs. Instead, a vertical toolbar provides you with a slew of editing modes, and you can work with your videoclips in any order you like.