Colorista II
A first look at Red Giants anticipated new release!When it comes to a program like After Effects, competing with Color Finesse 3 (that comes with AE CS5) can be tricky, but if there is one company out there determined to do it, it's Red Giant Software and their flagship color correction application Colorista. ...Read More »
Avid's Media Composer 5 Part 3 - Matrox's MXO2 mini
How Does it Fare?When AVID stated that they supported the MXO2 mini to monitor external video, I was pretty surprised, as this is a big change of direction for AVID as they normally only support their own hardware for video monitoring. I wanted to give the MXO2 mini a fair shake, as for the $449 price tag I really wanted (and hoped) it to work for the user bases sake. Let's see how it fared. ...Read More »
The Non-Linear Road To NAB
What's new in non-linear video editingFor video editors, NAB is akin to a pilgrimage. Every year they flock to Vegas, push themselves through the crowds to the booths of the video editor purveyors, and watch, learn, debate and yearn. Here are 5 top notch solutions, plus one who should have been there but wasn't! ...Read More »
iFunia Video Converter Pro for Macintosh
iFunia's Video Converter Pro is an application that converts your video into a wide variety of formats, including AVI, WMV, AVCHD, MKV, FLV, H.264/AVC, MP4, MOV, 3GP and DV. It is straightforward to use and the results are very good to excellent. The application works in three simple steps; Source Setup/Add, Destination Setup, and Start Conversion/Start.
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Adobe Premiere Elements 8
Adobe Premiere Elements version 8 has some added new features to an already full featured consumer level video editing application. It competes with other similar NLE's on the market, but remains, like most of its competition, a Windows only application.
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AJA Ki Pro
Sometimes a product just makes you say 'WOW!'Every once in a while (sometimes a long while), a product comes along that makes you say "WOW!". I haven't had one of those moments in a long time, until I got my hands on the Ki Pro from AJA. I remember sending my AJA PR rep an email when it first came out, and there was, of course, a backlog of reviewers who wanted to get their hands on one, so I went into the queue, and forgot about it. ...Read More »
Pinnacle Studio 14 Ultimate Collection HD and Class on Demand Complete Training for Pinnacle Studio 14
Pinnacle Studio 14 is a very mature video editing system targeted mostly at home users and video editing enthusiasts, but certainly not limited at these groups. Any application that continues into double digit versions has to be a good app with a lot of functionality, and Studio 14 is one of those application's that has its own ecosystem of support with books, online sites, and video tutorials.
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Speeding Premiere Pro CS4's H.264 Encoding with NVIDIA QuadroFX and Elemental Accelerator
Offloading video encoding tasks to the host GPU High definition video editing and HD video encoding are two of the hardware intensive tasks that can be done with a computer. It takes a lot of power to complete these types of jobs, oftentimes rendering your computer limited in functionality while it encodes video. NVIDIA's Quadro line of graphics cards can help to speed up H.264/AVC encoding in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 with an assist from Elemental Technologies' Elemental Accelerator. ...Read More »
Third Party Plug-Ins/Apps For Final Cut Pro
iFunia, idustrial revolution Volumetrix 2 Transitions and DVShade EasyLooks 2.5/LiveToon 1.0 Time for another edition of my third party plug-ins and software apps for Final Cut Pro (FCP). This time around, I take a look at the powerful and easy-to-use (with a ton of codec options) iFunia Video Converter Pro, FxFactory 2.1 and idustrial revolution's Volumetrix 2 transitions, and FxFactory 2.1 and DVShade's EasyLooks 2.5 and LiveToon 1.0. ...Read More »
Pegasys, Inc.'s TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress with Leadtek SpursEngine Hardware accelerator
MPEG-2/MPEG-4 hardware acceleratorTMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress is a video encoder application along the lines of Sorenson Squeeze, Apple's Compressor, and Adobe's Media Encoder. It has been around for quite a while, but doesn't seem to get the press that the other tools get, despite the output quality being very good. The application offers support for NVIDIA's CUDA technology as well as Leadtek's SpursEngine hardware accelerator. ...Read More »
