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FILM TECH
The latest Special Edition iMac DV - with its two FireWire ports and 13 gigs of disk space - may be the ultimate turn-on for anyone wishing to edit full-stream video. But Apple's box is not the right setup for a rank-and-file family videographer - even the new iMac's huge hard drive holds only 50 minutes of imagery. And while miniDV shots feel almost like pro news footage when fed back into a TV, you've got to admit that's overkill for Junior's first trip to Six Flags.
But several home-computer software-hardware combos do let you edit highly compressed video straight from any analog or digital camcorder. You get the ease of digitally chopping and shifting scenes on the computer screen, but the footage takes up a fraction of the space. These products use the MPEG-1 format, which approaches VHS quality. Most of the time, that's good enough.
I tried both Dazzle Digital Video Creator and Studio MP10. With Dazzle's box, you start by plugging your camera into the standard jacks and the box into the USB port of your computer - easy, huh? But that's where Dazzle stops dazzling. The package is finicky about combining clips that vary even slightly in their video properties. In other words, you can put together your videos of little Leah's dance recitals, but you probably won't be able to merge in a video file you've picked up on the Web. Even reshuffling clips feels like a hack: To get rid of a scene's middle, you have to copy the beginning and end into two new files and join them.
Studio MP10, a cable you install in the back of your PC, lets you import video clips just as easily (via parallel port). But here's the difference: The software detects scene changes and builds a timeline that makes editing as easy as drag-and-drop. And, like Dazzle, it comes with eye-grabbing transitions and background tunes. You can record a voice-over, add text titles, or port in music from your favorite CD. When you've prepped the video of that amusement-park trip, you can burn a CD with a menu for jumping to the various scenes and even play it afterward on some DVD players.
Just recently, Dazzle launched a family editing device that uses MPEG-2, a format with the same crystal clarity you get via satellite TV or DVD video. The product will still compress home videos to fit on your hard drive, but the quality will be much better. Pinnacle says it has plans to offer an MPEG-2 card soon as well. With Dazzle or Studio, video editing is now definitely an amateur sport.
Studio MP10: $269. Pinnacle Systems: +1 (650) 526 1600, www.pinnaclesys.com. Dazzle Digital Video Creator Internet Edition: $299.99. Dazzle Multimedia: +1 (510) 360 2300, www.dazzlemultimedia.com.
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