A few years back, the editors of Videomaker heard rumors of a standalone editor that used a hard drive, yet didn’t require a computer to operate. Before we knew it, an entirely new category of video editor was born. Since then, the Casablanca has gone through a number of changes. MacroSystem

$400 TDK Electronics Corp 901 Franklin Avenue Garden City, NY 11530 (516) 535-2600 www.tdk.com TDK is a very big name in the blank media business, manufacturing both tapes and discs. And although TDK is not primarily a hardware manufacturer, it offers a number of attractive branded bundles, with go

$70 ($100 boxed) Ahead Software Inc 330 N. Brand Blvd., Ste 695 Glendale, CA 91203 www.nero.com Burning a disc is perhaps the least glamorous aspect of DVD creation. Sure, encoding may be tedious and technical, but at least you can be involved in the encoding process (if that’s your thing). W

Digital cameras are everywhere today. Not just video cameras, but still cameras too. Even our cell phones and PDAs have cameras in them. Digital still camera owners quickly discover that they snap loads more pictures than they ever would with a film camera. Now wait: Isn’t this a video magazi

Editing software and computers are now mainstream products. Once you have the hardware, including a digital camcorder and a FireWire port on your computer, you are ready to go. If you’ve purchased a new computer in the last couple of years, it probably already includes some piece of software

Take two Intel Xeon 3.06GHz processors, each with HT architecture, and you end up with a virtual quadro-CPU system. Pragmatically speaking, there is only so much a single user can do to stress out four processors. Still, we’ll take a serious whack in this editing computer review and see if can

We’ve written in these pages about the wonderful result of competition in the world of editing software. Media Studio Pro and Premiere would not be the fabulous products they are today without the fierce rivalry between them. We can’t help but be concerned about the impact of a free prod

Canon Ships Elura 50 Mini DV Camcorder Canon’s Elura 50 Mini DV camcorder, which shipped in May, features a 10x optical zoom lens and dual image processing capabilities, which Canon says improve the quality of both still and video images. SD or MultiMedia Cards store still images shot by the

Instead of dividing time eras into BC and AD, instructional designers could use BP and AP instead, meaning Before PowerPoint or After PowerPoint. Once, we were a tiny guild of specialists who jealously guarded the secrets of blueprinting effective teaching media and practiced our arcane arts for pat

The guy yelling “Cut!” usually has his own chair, gets to boss people around and generally is able to make other people believe he knows what he’s talking about. And this is for a good reason. He does. When was the last time you heard a director shout, “Aannnnd, Page Turn!

$350 Serious Magic 2870-B Gold Tailings Court Rancho Cordova, CA 95670 (916) 859-0100 www.seriousmagic.com Visual Communicator Pro is automatic green screen software software. Although it was originally designed for corporate communications and video email, the DV edition is an excellent tool for

$2,819 Hewlett-Packard Company 3000 Hanover Street Palo Alto, CA 94304 (800) 888-9909 www.hp.com It used to be that we recommended two paths for video editors looking to buy a computer. We recommended that novices get a complete turnkey and avoid trouble. For those on a tight budget, but with some

We have no reservations about recommending Ulead Media Studio Pro 7 (MSP7). Ulead has been around as long as anyone and consistently comes out with industry-first technology before the other guys, sometimes months in advance. If you are a serious hobbyist or entry-level professional looking for a se

Over this past spring school break, we took a family trip to the Grand Canyon. It’s an amazing experience, in part because the canyon itself is a kind of map of the Earth’s geological history. Dramatic horizontal bands etch the canyon walls with different colors. I remember laughing to m

As long as you edit your own shows, you can shoot any kind of footage you like, but if another editor handles post production for you, you have to deliver the materials to let the cutter do the job right. And even if you always do your own post, you can make your own work a lot easier (and better)

$300 Pinnacle Systems 280 N. Bernardo Avenue Mountain View, CA 94043 (650) 526-1600 www.pinnaclesys.com We liked the $100 Studio 7 software from Pinnacle. The Studio 8 Deluxe version ($300) deserves another look, not just for adding a "1" to the version, but because of added hardware feat

The art of the compressionist is an arcane one at best. For many, the final encode for distribution is an anti-climactic and tedious process. If you regularly need to process your video in multiple formats or have multiple files that you want to automatically encode to a single format, a transcoding

Computers that are capable of editing video are quite common in today’s marketplace, so much so that one entire computer platform–the Apple Macintosh–has made video editing a prominent feature on all of its computers. Affordable desktop video has become almost as common as the word

Long ago, when the first CD burners hit the market, the equipment was very expensive, but prices fell rapidly and, today, most entry-level computers come with a CD burner. One could safely expect that this will soon be the situation with DVD burners. Times were simpler back when the first CD burner

$1,000 Sonic Solutions 101 Rowland Way Novato, CA 94945 (415) 893-8000 www.sonic.com We didn’t find any perfect sub-$1,000 DVD authoring applications this year. Some programs lacked vital features and some produced strangely incompatible discs. Sonic’s ReelDVD (acquired from Daikin), ho