Movie Edit Pro 10 advertises on its box that it is a fully featured video-editing suite, built for the novice in video editing. This, among other things, is what I set out to test. I, for all other intents and purposes, have never used a professional video-editing suite before, so I considered myself a perfect test of this claim. Through testing of this program, I found that it could indeed do some complex things, although the more complex of them will take some practice for a novice. Overall, however, I found this claim quite founded. With the instruction booklet that is included, I was never completely stumped as to what to do.
When you aim to use a media-editing suite, you must expect that it will require a fairly decent computer. I’ve had the experience of testing Movie Edit Pro 10 with two different generations of computers: a high-end machine with a new CPU and a lot of RAM, and an older machine with barely adequate CPU speed and RAM. The results are fairly obvious – while the older computer ran the program, it just had a hard time handling the video. Encoding made the computer crawl to a halt at times. What is the moral of this story? Make sure that you have a good computer to run this program on.
The high-end machine, however, took the program’s worst with ease. The test movies that I used were all 20-40 minutes long, and in DivX movie format. From this format, I converted to Windows Media format (WMV, Microsoft’s format), Quicktime (Apple’s video format), and MPEG2 (used in DVDs), which are three popular formats. All three movie formats took close to the same time to compress, and they all looked very similar to the original, which is something you often look for in video conversion. There were expected artifacts caused by the conversion of one format to another, but this is something that I fully expected coming into it. If you turn the bit rate high enough, however, it should take care of that at the cost of a larger video file size.
Text effects were another feature that I played with for a good portion of my time. Adding text to video can have several uses: if you are translating a video, you can use it for subtitling work, or you can add a little message in a scene for comedic effect. Really, if you’re playing with it, it’s just good fun. In addition, you can use either 3D or 2D flat text on videos, giving you a wider range to be creative with. The 3D text is something that really comes in handy when creating DVD menus.
A feature in Movie Edit Pro 10 that I was impressed with was an image stabilizer, which allows you stabilize the picture of a movie you capture. This is really useful for smoothing out those videos you shoot with your home camera, and it works quite well. I didn’t have any videos to use personally, so I found a test candidate on the Movie Edit Pro 10 CD, and the resulting movie was nearly devoid of shakes. This feature alone is worth quite a bit to all of you out there that like to tape family outings.
Another thing that is included with Movie Edit Pro 10 is a batch of tech demo files. These demos aim to show you what the program is capable of doing. The extras for Movie Edit Pro 10 bring the total install size of the package to a bit more than a gigabyte, but being able to see what the makers of the software can do with it is worth the extra storage space. One of the movies in particular ran through practically every video effect the program is capable of doing, including the green screen effect (which I was really unable to test on my own), so it was good seeing this particular effect in action. Note that, especially for this test video, you will need a very high-end computer. Otherwise it will take all day to encode.
