Video editors

Home Office Computing, Jan, 1998 by Victoria Hall Smith

Nothing sells like a picture, and a video goes a step further. You've mastered creating respectable business communications using your word processor, desktop publisher, or presentation program; now, whether it's a quick clip on your Web site or a short promotional video about your business's mission and style, it's time for video.

And why not -- video is a great kick in your marketing pants! As computers increase in performance and video editing software drops below $1,000, the basic video editing tools are at hand. For this Buyer's Guide, we tested four video editing packages ranging in price from $80 tO $520 on Windows and Macintosh systems. Our conclusion: It's time to add video to your communications mix.

For our review, we created three real-world, tough tests for a small business looking to use video as a promotional tool. First, we created a 10-second video-clip suitable for jazzing up a Web page -- just a quick pan and zoom on colorful local flora. Second, we created a 30-second broadcast -- quality television commercial, Complete with video, transitions, and three tracks of audio (ambient sound, background music, and narration or voice-over). Finally, we created a five-minute promotional video with the same elements as the TV commercial, plus on-camera sound bytes.

For these grueling tests, we used an average Dell PC: a 166MHz Pentium with 32MB of RAM, a 2-5GB hard disk, sound card, and 64-bit graphics card. For the Macintosh program, we used an Apple Power Mac 6500/275, configured with a 275Mhz PowerPC 603, 32MB of RAM, and a 4GB hard disk with the Creative Bundle, Apple Video System, and Avid Cinema card built in.

Avid Cinema 1.1.2

Avid Cinema is so easy to use you could probably plug your vacuum cleaner into your computer and make great videos. Thankfully, simple is not synonymous with weak. Avid Cinema has a rich palette of easy-to-find and easy-to-use features, not everything we'd want but more than enough to make decent videos. The program looks like a folder with tabs for each of the steps in the process of making a video.

Capturing video was quick with the detailed help diagrams for connecting our camcorder or VCR to the Mac. Unfortunately, there's no time code or duration indicator, so we were forced to use the time display on our camcorder to see the length of the clip we were capturing. Length of clips is available only in the Storyboard tab, so we had to keep tabbing back to it to check the length of our current test video.

Avid Cinema's tools for adding transitions or effects, titles, and sound were clear, with a button for removing any mistakes we made.

Creating a 10-second clip for a Web page took us less than 30 minutes, including saving it to the correct format, frame rate, and frame size for the Internet. All of that was done automatically for us when we clicked on the Internet/www button on the Send Video Out tab. That same tab offers different buttons to automatically format for CD-ROMs, presentation software, and videotape-quality clips suitable for our 30-second commercial.

Three separate sound tracks, each with its own sliding volume control, helped simplify our 30-second commercial test as well as our five-minute promotional video test. We were able to keep desired portions of the ambient sound recorded with our video, add narration where appropriate, and include background music from a CD, taking advantage of the Fade In/Fade Out buttons next to the volume control.

However, some of our other test software beat Avid Cinema for fine-tuning and control. Besides the lack of time code mentioned above, there's no system for logging raw video and no brightness and color adjustments. Mac users with a yen for video editing should jump cut to Avid Cinema for the Mac.

Lumiere

Lumiere is actually a suite of products meant for creating exciting multimedia projects and videos. The Lumiere suite we tested edits and combines video, sound, and still pictures: Corel Motion 3D 7.o scales, rotates, and moves videoclips, and Corel Photo-Paint 6 edits and creates still images. Installing the suite was easy enough, but our system froze when we first tried to use it. After a quick reboot, we followed the excellent tutorial to create a sample video.

It quickly became apparent, however, that Lumiere is for editing existing clips only. For capturing video, users are referred to the manuals for their capture card. Lumiere's dialog boxes for bringing in captured video were complete, but information about compression settings was vague.

We couldn't log our video clips, per se; we had to preview our video in the Video Controller window and set our "in and out points" as we captured the clips. The suite's video and audio controllers allowed us to crop the images and the Snap-on Dragging feature let us drag and drop videoclips into a sequence with precise alignment. Lumiere's generous selection of transitions and special effects worked the same way, but the more complex the transition, the slower the playback or preview.