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Picks of the Month
Five digital editing programs for middle and high school students bring moviemaking to a desktop near you.
Students and teachers ready to graduate from Apple's iMovie or Microsoft's Movie Maker now have an array of sophisticated video editing options. In this review, we examine a broad spectrum of programs, ranging from relatively inexpensive basic applications, such as Ulead's VideoStudio 6 and Pinnacle Systems' Studio DV 7, that put a premium on user-friendly video creation, to pricier professional products, such as Adobe Premiere, Apple's Final Cut Pro, and Avid Xpress DV, that transform the desktop into a versatile moviemaking studio.
All programs reviewed here allow users to control a connected video cameras input and output. They also support nonlinear editing, enabling users to cut and paste video clips and adjust video sequences frame by frame in much the same way a word processor manages text. Additional features in common include standard Storyboard and Timeline areas, where you can shuffle video clips, still image frames, sounds, special effects, and other elements to make your movie. Each program supports drag-and-drop tools that let you move images, sounds, and transition effects from a clip library to the Storyboard and insert these objects between two others to modify an existing dip sequence. The more versatile video editors incorporate options for exporting video footage to tape or another medium so that video playback is not limited to a desktop computer monitor.
VideoStudio 6
(Ulead)
As with all programs included here, VideoStudio 6 captures digital video source files directly from a camcorder connected to a computer either through a FireWire adapter or a video capture card.
Launch the program, and the interface displays tasks as tabbed menus at the top of the screen. Each tab represents another step in the video capture and editing process. Initially, this tab structure is very helpful because tab headings (Start, Capture, Storyboard, Effect, Overlay, Title, Audio, and Finish) structure the moviemaking process. However, some users may find the program frustrating because it does't use a standard Windows interface. That is, there are no conventional drop-down menus, and the taskbar is hidden, so you can't easily switch from one application to another. Despite its departure from convention, novice moviemakers will...