Software Recommendations

Serif is a British software company that, for the past umpteen years, has specialised in developing products aimed at the consumer and home business. Their PagePlus desktop publishing programme is used extensively at MakingYourOwnCandles for the production of leaflets and instruction booklets, having replaced Microsoft Publisher in my affections a few years back.

I’d been a long time fan of Adobe’s Premiere Elements video editor but the past few releases have been disappointing. Diabolically slow in use, liable to crash and not supporting the formats I needed – I’d been reduced to using Techsmith’s  Camtasia for general purpose video editing. Now, Camtasia is an excellent tool for creating videos of screen activity or converting Powerpoint slideshows into interactive, narrated videos. It can also be used for basic video editing but I knew my latest video project would stretch it, and me, to breaking point.

I’ve been meaning to create a series of tutorial videos for MakingYourOwnCandles for some time now but I’m simply not prepared to do them in a half-arsed manner. So, I’ve spent time and money experimenting with various setups to get what I want. My experience of video production goes back to the 1990s when I was Product Training Manager for Dixons Stores Group and so commissioned lots of training videos from professional production companies. What struck me back then was that it wasn’t the quality of the video or even the lighting that made the difference between amateur and professional results, it was the quality of the sound.

So, for this project, I recorded the sound through a Hama lapel microphone into a Zoom H2 Handy Recorder. The main camera was a cheapish Sanyo Xacti placed on a tripod with the LCD screen tilted so I could see, vaguely, whether I was in frame. I also wanted a second camera focused on what I was doing on the table so that viewers could see exactly how the candle was made. For this, I chose the Microsoft LifeCam Studio, connected to my laptop which was used as a monitor.

Anyway, the net result of all this was that I would have two video sources and a separate sound source to mix together to make the final video, which I wanted to be in 720p format. This was going to be way beyond Camtasia.

I thought about giving Premiere another go but was put off by the price and poor Amazon reviews. So I loaded up Serif MoviePlus X5 and what a delight it’s been!

The first thing to say is that, like any software, it takes some learning. Fortunately, I’ve used Premiere and Sony Vegas and MoviePlus X5 is superficially similar. I much prefer the Timeline editing mode (though MoviePlus does also include a Storyboard view) especially when working with multiple channels.

MoviePlus happily accepted all my media – the Xacti outputting in MP4 and the Lifecam (surprise) using WMV – both at the required 1280×720 resolution. A minor quibble is that it’s not possible to drag and drop from Explorer directly onto the timeline: the media ends up in the media panel and then has to be dragged into place.

Otherwise, editing was a simple process. It’s important to get the layers right: channels that appear at the top of the screen will also appear above the other channels when the video is created. For example, if you want a logo/watermark, this needs to go on a top layer. Essentially, I create an overlay later for the logo, a video layer for the Lifecam footage, a second video layer for the main footage from the Sanyo and an audio channel for the Zoom’s output.

The biggest issue was synchronising the two video channels together so that I could cut between them and then synchronising the audio. The process is to repeatedly split and move channels until they line up and then use the intuitive opacity control to fade in and out the close-up view provided by the Lifecam.

You can add images (a logo for example) but I couldn’t find a way to resize and reposition them so I ended up creating a 1280×720 image in Fireworks with the logo in the top left corner and a transparent background.

MoviePlus has a good range of transitions but I tend to follow the BBC approach of only using them very sparingly and sticking to simple transitions. Similarly, there’s a range of video effects but I only used the brightness control as I’d mucked up the lighting slightly.

Finally, MoviePlus outputs to just about any format you might want, except (as far as I can tell) Flash FLV which is an odd omission. Most of my blogs use that format and it adds an extra stage if I then have to convert. Having said that, MP4 is becoming increasingly accepted and YouTube output, for example, is seamless (as is iPad and iPhone output).

For me, MoviePlus is a triumph. My only major gripe is that on my quad-core (Q8200 2.33GHz) PC the interface become very sluggish as I piled up the channels and media. On the positive side, MoviePlus does at least use all available cores so the workload is distributed as far as possible. My PC is around 18 months old now and was hardly bleeding edge at the time. I fully accept that editing HD video is going to put a strain on the hardware and I don’t blame MoviePlus for this.

MoviePlus is a well thought out, feature rich video editor that, in my experience, is rock solid. I felt I was tempting fate with all that I threw at it but, whilst it ran pretty slowly as my project became more complex, it didn’t fall over once. At £59.99 (inc VAT) it’s an absolute bargain – by far the best consumer video editor I’ve seen. Now if only it could improve my delivery (which is decidedly Shatner-esque) and remind me to turn the microphone on…

 

 

 

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