Pure Motion Edit Studio 4

Edit Studio is similar to Magix Video Deluxe 2 in that it attempts to provide advanced video-editing features and a 'professional' style interface, while at the same time appealing to novice users.

Like Magix Video Deluxe, Edit Studio uses a 'Media Explorer' browser to organise project content, effects and transitions. There's a page list, similar to Windows Movie Maker's tasks pane, a resizable video monitor and a storyboard/timeline area centred at the top of the screen.

DV capture is well catered for, with a big monitor window and plenty of status information and options for batch capture and automatic scene detection on both a content and date/time basis. Like Videowave, Edit Studio creates virtual clips by adjusting the in and out points of a master reference clip, rather than physically splitting the file, which has its drawbacks.

Version 4 has several new features, which we were keen to try out. There's a new route tracer effect that plots animated lines on a map or other background, a customisable old film effects filter, a knockout effect for removing time/date stamps and titling tools.

To qualify as easy to use, an application should provide a simple method for arranging clips on the storyboard and applying transitions and filters, and Edit Studio started out promisingly. You can drag clips from the Media Explorer to the storyboard and drop transitions onto the transition boxes.

When it came to effects things became less straightforward. Keen to check out the old film effect we dragged this onto the first clip in the storyboard layout, to be rewarded not with scratchy 12 frames per second, black and white footage, but a message telling us 'this effect cannot be used as a topping'.

Edit Studio uses two methods to apply effects, toppings apply to entire clips, objects reside on the timeline in a separate track and can apply to any section of it. This isn't explained anywhere in the help file.

While other applications allow you to toggle between storyboard and timeline mode-in Edit Studio this is a one-way street. You can switch to timeline mode easily, but to do any editing you must first convert the storyboard layers to timeline layers and this is an irreversible operation.

The old film effect comes with five presets and you can customise it using the controls in the properties panel to adjust the frame rate, jitter, colour and brightness, hair and blemishes, and scratches. But for all its tweakability it's still just an old film effect that?s been around for a long time.

The route tracer looked promising; creating a moving path to join locations on a map is a technique used in movies for transition between scenes in different locations, but usually requires sophisticated post-production. Seven presets are provided and you can change the line style, number of nodes, node shape, animation speed and even the pause duration once the line reaches a node, but the paths are predefined and there's no way of altering them.

Titling proved to be another minefield, and working out how to make use of the newly introduced Keyframe effects took the best part of an hour. Edit Studio has a good range of title presets including crawls, rolling credits, subtitles and some nice-looking animations, but even the simple task of replacing the placeholder text with something more appropriate proved difficult. A screengrab in the help file would have put us on the right path in seconds.

Aside from the tricky interface and poor documentation, Edit Studio is slow and clunky. There's often a short, but niggling delay after applying edits and, even in draft mode, the preview drops frames during straight playback with no effects or transitions applied.

At this price we'd expect to see DVD authoring and burning included. As it is you'll have to pay an extra £20 for the Mpeg XS plug-in which will allow you to export DVD-compliant mpeg2 video, but you'll still need an authoring application. If, despite all this, you still want to give Edit Studio 4 a try, download the 30-day trial and, if you want to buy, go for the limited ignition version, which limits you to six layers and omits keyframes and the DV monitor feature, but costs only £19.99 inc VAT .

Contact: Pure Motion 07092 265 529
www.puremotion.com

System requirements:

• 500MHz Pentium II
• Windows 98 (SE),ME, 2000 or XP
• 4GB of disk space
• DirectX 8
• 128MB of Ram