Few things get a vacation-bound computer hobbyist’s heart going faster than a new digital video camcorder.
But all too soon the fun and games end, leaving us back home with maxed-out memory cards filled with clips of tennis shoes and fluorescent ceiling fixtures interspersed among some family video treasures.
And so it has come to pass that a global horde of software houses vie to sell hobbyists a bewildering bunch of programs to handle digital media editing. The idea is to edit out the goofs and gaffes and then dress the production up.
Imagine twirling headlines, Keystone Kops-style fast forwards, clever borders, wacky soundtracks, comic book-style dialogue balloons and a great many other embellishments that might embarrass a Spielberg or Lucas but that are the cat’s meow for proud pops and memory-keeping moms.
In a world where there are perhaps two significant makers of word processors, there is a Kentucky Derby-size field of entries racing for the video hobbyist dollar. These products include Ulead Video Studio ($60), Roxio VideoWave 8 ($50), Adobe Premiere Elements ($100), Pinnacle Studio Version 10.5 ($70) and Magix Movie Edit Pro 11 ($60). (These prices are suggested retail and during vacation season most of these outfits offer discounts.)
With the exception of Adobe’s Premier Elements, these programs are promoted for features designed to make it as easy as possible for busy parents, tech-phobic singles and confused retirees.
Over the last couple of years this column has given generally upbeat reviews of all of those mentioned above except Magix Movie Edit Pro, and I’m about to fix that.
This, too, will be a fairly upbeat assessment, and there’s a reason for all this bluebird-on-my-shoulder sweetness. It’s not difficult for serious makers of professional video editing software to add a palette of features that deliver simplified yet impressive versions of the special effects and professional-like titles, credits, transitions, stop action and more.
After a couple of weeks working with Magix Edit Pro 11, I found a few great items that make it stand out. That starts with an amazing tool that steadies a lot of the annoying bobbing up and down created by a hapless hobbyist with a hand-held camcorder. How many millions of feet of home video have been ruined because of shaky hands?
When a user places the mouse cursor inside such a clip and gives a right-click, the pop-up menu includes an Image Stabilization tool. When the stabilizer is picked, a display pops up showing the first frame with a white box outlining about two-thirds of the image. By cropping the center of a shaking clip, the software redraws each frame to stabilize the image in the smaller box.
The smaller box compensates for the detail lost as the frames are redone to keep the image still. The worse the motion the smaller the image that survives, but I was amazed at how my own gaffes were fixed by this one tool.
Movie Edit Pro 11’s strength is that it boils down a plethora of tools into a set of simple routines called MovieShow Maker that makes quick work of turning a set of clips into an on-screen scrapbook.
Plug your video camera into the USB or FireWire port on a Windows XP computer and the software starts by making a digital copy of the whole film. An automatic scene recognizer senses when the camera is shut off or when it is moved from indoors to out and a new clip is created at that point.
Each clip is shown as a thumbnail; it’s a snap to run through them all and cut out miscues and tennis shoes.
At the simplest level a user is shown a rather large thumbnail of a clip or of a whole movie in a box with three choices above the image. A text button calls up the titling tool that lets one enter text and order it to scroll or twirl or otherwise move across the screen.
Next is a volume control to ensure the sound isn’t too soft or too loud. Finally, an FX button calls up a simple collection of slider bars to fix exposure problems by changing brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, gamma and other photographic variables. Whether it’s a dark scene lighted by six candles on a child’s cake or a ski scene overexposed in the sun, these tools can salvage enough to make a passable movie.
A soundtrack is made by dragging an icon for a song file or a track from a CD onto a timeline. A scissors icon on the preview screen lets one snip sound or video clips. And there are easy-to-apply audio fade-ins and fade-outs and visual transitions to make things start and end with style.
Hold that thought. There is one word that describes the way the makers of Magix Movie Edit Pro 11 guide novices or pros through the complexities of moviemaking. They do it with style.
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim, or e-mail jcoates1@aol.com. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.
