Consumers worldwide spent nearly half a billion dollars on digital video software last year, according to a new study by John Peddie Research.
The firm predicts flat spending this year, partly due to the economic downturn but also because “consumers have made it very clear that they are not interested in difficult-to-use video editing software.”
I can vouch for that, having tried a number of video editing packages, but still having to fall back on something as simple as Windows Movie Maker to get the job done.
The PC world can obviously learn a lot from Apple, which is masterful at multimedia and making video-editing easy.
Aside from iMovie, the latest version of the Quicktime player allows simple editing and the iPhone 3G S, with its video functionality, has simple-to-use software for editing and uploading to the web.
I recently bought a Creative Vado video camera, which is similar to the Flip Mino HD in allowing the user to record high-definition video to flash memory in a shirt-pocket sized device.
It plugs into the computer with its built-in USB and allows simple editing and uploading using the included software.
But much consumer video suffers from the poor low-light capabilities of devices and camera-shake that no amount of editing can disguise.
One program I can recommend brightens up and steadies the picture to a noticeable degree and can also sharpen blurry images.
MotionDSP’s vReveal, launched in March, is a $50 consumer version of Ikena, a higher-powered product running to thousands of dollars that is used by forensics experts in government agencies.
Its intuitive interface allows users to preview improvements that can be made to underlit, shaky or grainy videos.
Processing the upgraded video into a new file can take some time. A 20-second clip took a minute on my high-powered Core i7 quad-core system, but MotionDSP told me it would have been much quicker if my system had an Nvidia graphics card using its Cuda technology.
With Nvidia an investor in the company, MotionDSP has no plans to support AMD’s rival ATI Stream technology, but it will go on to support the OpenCL standard and is working with Intel engineers to optimise the software for CPUs.
Once video is enhanced and edited, the next step is often to transcode it into a different format – to play on an iPhone or PlayStationPortable for example, or to upload to YouTube.
Cyberlink’s $40 MediaShow Espresso has an easy-to-grasp interface and blazing fast conversions, with its support for Core i7, Cuda and ATI Stream.
I found it a little buggy and not able to handle every format – such as MKV HD files - but it was very satisifying to see all four cores on my PC working at close to 100 per cent to convert videos in a matter of minutes on tasks I would previously have left to run overnight on my old single-core desktop.
If Espresso fails to handle every format, the same cannot be said for VLC, a final video software recommendation. It is a free open-source player for your completed video that has just reached its 1.0 version after many iterations.
The new version even allows recording of the video, meaning anything that is being played, even encrypted DVDs, can be made into digital files.
