Dazzle MovieStar 5

MovieStar 5 ships with Dazzle's hardware products such as Fusion and Hollywood Bridge. It's also included in the DVD authoring suite DVD Complete and, by the time you read this, will be available as a standalone application.

Like other budget packages, MovieStar's basic functions include digital and analogue capture, basic editing using either the storyboard or a simple timeline, and output to a variety of formats including DV tape, a number of Mpeg-1 and Mpeg-2 presets suitable for VCD and DVD burning and Windows and RealAudio web streaming.

The uncluttered interface is split into three tabs providing tools for capture, editing and production. As with all the products here, DV capture performed first time, faultlessly, though MovieStar has neither batch capture, nor automatic scene detection.

Captured clips are added to the media browser on the left of the editing screen alongside the viewing window, with the storyboard/timeline running along the bottom. The screen layout is designed for 1024 x 768 resolution.

It won't fit on a smaller screen and a larger screen will not gain you a bigger preview window, just larger gaps between elements. The browser is split into four panes for media (your captured clips and other imported pictures, video and sound clips), titles, transitions and effects.

You can quickly produce a movie simply by dragging clips onto the vacant storyboard frames and placing transitions between them. The preview window provides controls for playing the timeline and, even in storyboard mode there's a playhead which can be 'scrubbed' - dragged along the storyboard for instant playback and positioning anywhere within the movie.

A unique editing feature is the Fast Kut Multi-trimmer, which allows you to simultaneously view and edit all four points of a clip on the storyboard or timeline - the in and out points of the current clip, aswell as the out point of the preceding clip and the in point of the subsequent clip.

Two panels flank the main viewing window; the left one displays the in point of the current clip and, in a slightly smaller panel below, the out point of the preceding clip. Below each is a slider, used to adjust the edit point. An identical panel to the right of the main viewing window provides thumbnail views and sliders for the out point of the current clip and the in point of the next clip.

Jump buttons allow you to skip back and forth along the timeline to each edit, so you can easily make adjustments to any or all edit points. Few budget packages provide good four-point editing tools and MovieStar is ahead of the game here.

The transitions and effects are, at first glance, of a similar quality and style to those in other budget editors. Transitions are categorised into 3D, dissolve, iris, push, slide, special, stretch, wipe and zoom folders containing anywhere between two and 20 variants.

Effects, which are applied by dropping directly onto, rather than between clips, include a variety of distort, blur, paint, colour adjustment, and even weather (snow, anyone?) filters.

MovieStar takes a one-size-fits-all approach - not one of the transitions or filters is adjustable. At the very least it should be possible to adjust the length of a dissolve, but even this is fixed.

Looking on the positive side, this keeps things simple; all you need, or can do is apply the transition and get on with it. But it severely cramps the creative potential of these effects and takes the fun out of the process.

Thankfully, the title editor is not similarly restricted and you can create animated rolling and fading titles with variable timing. It's simple to use; you select your typeface and colour and, for the rolling option, select the start and end position and preview the effect before pressing the Create button. You can create titles with a transparent background that can be overlayed on a video clip, but only in timeline mode.

The Produce panel features a tabbed interface providing options for recording back to your DV camcorder, to your hard drive, creating and uploading streaming video to Dazzle's Webcast theatre server, and recording to disc. The last of these being a link to DVD Complete, not included in the standalone package.

System requirements:

• 500MHz processor
• Windows 98SE/2000/Me/XP
• 128MB of Ram
• 1024 x 768 24-bit video display