VIDEO EDITING

The Way It Was....

Until the early '90s, editing home videos was a tortuous task involving either costly editing consoles or the frustration of assembling the footage by hand. Even then, adding and mixing sound, creating titles, inserting transitions, and adding visual effects were luxuries few systems offered, or few owners could afford. It was quite common to have to operate over several generations to finish up with the final movie, with the consequence of poor video quality. If, at the end of all this, a minor change was required, then the whole process had to be repeated from scratch.

Inevitably the PC, which was becoming an essential home accessory, emerged as the host for a number of new computer-controlled home editing solutions. Despite their innovative appeal, none of these systems lived up to their expectations until the launch of Video Director 200. Although this system had a 'shaky' start, Pinnacle inherited the product and turned it around to provide the home movie enthusiast with a system that offered unprecedented functionality. As good as it was, it was still an effort to produce a movie of any substance and the sound editing facilities were very limited.

The Revolution Began...

Then,  Pinnacle released Studio400, which must rank as one of the most ambitious and innovative home video linear editing products of its time. At last it was possible to edit an analogue  movie off-line, add complex transitions and titles, and have full control over the mixing of original sound with music and effects. All this was achievable with a very low hard-disk storage overhead, and involving only one (inevitable) video generation loss.

Despite the advertised ease of use, the underlying system complexity caused some users considerable frustration, particularly for those with low grade video and PC equipment. The majority of these problems usually emerged during the Make Movie (to tape) stage, where all system components were called upon to perform in harmony, and with real-time accuracy. For others, including myself, the system gave little trouble, and we continued to use it, despite more advanced Non Linear Editing (NLE) systems becoming within the home user's reach, and budget.

Enter Digital Video....

There was DC10+, and StudioMP10, both analogue editors, but the home-editing world was taken by storm when StudioDV arrived, which was designed specifically for the digital camcorder user. For an NLE system it was unique because it had an editing mode which allows low resolution capture, like Studio400. This was made possible by the IEEE1394 (Firewire, iLink) interface, which has control and timecode functions similar to the Lanc (Sony),  Pan5 (Panasonic), and JLip (JVC) busses, used with the Studio400 System. Although editing is carried out in low resolution, during the Make Movie stage full resolution footage from the camcorder is captured to disk, but only for those sections included in the movie. Working in this mode practically guarantees that the 4GB file limit will not be exceeded with FAT32 systems.

And For The Mobile Laptop User...

With the demise of Studio400 and, latterly, MP10, which were external (parallel port) devices, the ability to edit analogue footage on a normal laptop computer was severely compromised. In fact, analogue editing, even on a desktop computer, took a back-seat in the shadow of the StudioDV product, DC10+ being the only respectable NLE upgrade path for many.

At the beginning of this year (2001), a new Studio product was released. Called Studio OnLine, it filled the Analogue/Laptop void by including a USB capture device with composite video and stereo audio inputs. Designed to enable web-compatible and email movies to be produced, it also has the capability of producing medium-resolution movie files to disk in a number of output formats. There is, however, no direct means of producing movies to tape. This, in fact, is just one product in a line of recent releases from Pinnacle, all offering a similar (integrated) Studio Editing Interface, but differing in the means of capture, and final output.

A New Breed Of NLE Editors

What was needed, it seemed, was a generic Studio product, which could be used with a variety of capture devices. This arrived in the middle of the year (2001) with the amazing Pinnacle Studio7, which is available as a software-only product, or with a Pinnacle IEEE 1394 card. This new editor will work with any OHCI compliant IEEE 1394 card, and with many USB capture devices (including Studio Online), and with their DC10+ product. There are many new features in Studio7 that give it the capability of producing movie effects that would previously only be found in expensive hardware editing suites. Shortly there will be a new area on this website devoted to this incredible product, together with it's amazing sister application Hollywood FX.

Moving Towards DVD Authoring

In September this year (2001) a new kind of product trotted out of the Pinnacle stable. This is an authoring product for CDs and DVDs. Known as Pinnacle Express, it is based on the very expensive Impression package. At the present time it will only import DV-AVI files, or capture from DV camcorders, but there are plans to widen the range of input formats. You can read an in-depth appraisal of this product here. 

Interestingly, if you do not have a DV camcorder, but have Studio Online and Studio 7, you may now produce superb edited Video CDs from your analogue camcorder, for viewing on TV. This should put some life into Studio Online.