Video Editors Go Beyond Ego-Casts

Written By
John Taschek
John Taschek
Published: Oct 7, 2002
Updated: Feb 2, 2021
2 minute read
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Three powerful video editing applications—Adobes Premiere 6.5, Pinnacles Edition and Avids Xpress—make a good corporate fit.

Of the three, Premiere 6.5 is the most corporate-ready. It fully integrates with other Adobe products, including Photoshop and Illustrator, allowing users to create mattes and textures in these applications and drag them into Premiere.

Premiere 6.5, released in August for $549 (upgrades start at $149), supports DVD- authoring, MPEG 2 and a real-time preview, which has become something of a biblical issue in the video world. I recommend Premiere for all corporate video production needs.

In Pinnacles $699 Edition, there is no real-time preview, but Pinnacle is constantly background-rendering the project. Theoretically, by the time users are done with the project, theyll get the fully rendered project. This is suitable for the corporate market, which typically uses minimal transitions and has simple editing needs.

Edition, on the other hand, might have the best video editing interface in the world, but anyone familiar with other video editors might be taken aback. Editions interface defies standard Windows and Mac OS conventions. That said, Edition is extraordinarily powerful and comes with a wide variety of titles and effects. I recommend Edition for companies that want to add bells and whistles to video and dont mind an unconventional interface.

Avid still makes the most powerful video editing package for high-end video editing needs. Avids lowest-priced version, Xpress DV 3.5, costs $1,699 and is the best solution for true video production (as opposed to streaming ego-casts).

For any of these packages, I also strongly recommend video editing control systems, such as Contour ShuttlePro, which provides a jog control and programmable buttons. At about $100, they are time-saving bargains.

John Taschek

As the director of eWEEK Labs, John manages a staff that tests and analyzes a wide range of corporate technology products. He has been instrumental in expanding eWEEK Labs' analyses into actual user environments, and has continually engineered the Labs for accurate portrayal of true enterprise infrastructures. John also writes eWEEK's 'Wide Angle' column, which challenges readers interested in enterprise products and strategies to reconsider old assumptions and think about existing IT problems in new ways. Prior to his tenure at eWEEK, which started in 1994, Taschek headed up the performance testing lab at PC/Computing magazine (now called Smart Business). Taschek got his start in IT in Washington D.C., holding various technical positions at the National Alliance of Business and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. There, he and his colleagues assisted the government office with integrating the Windows desktop operating system with HUD's legacy mainframe and mid-range servers.

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