MovieShop Deluxe 6 Review Powerful Features, Quirky Package John P. Mello Jr.
Wed 8/28/02 -- As editing home videos on a PC becomes less of a "wow" application and more of a mainstream pastime, more and more software makers are competing to see whose moviemaking program can hit the best mix of friendly controls, robust feature set, and value.
The new Version 6 of Broderbund's MovieShop Deluxe need take a back seat to nothing short of professional titles like Adobe Premiere when it comes to features. And it's affordably priced at $90. But the software slips a bit in the ease-of-use department -- something you might not expect from the brand behind The Print Shop, Kid Pix, and 3D Home Architect.
Layer Upon Layer
Two features that set MovieShop apart from many entry-level video editors are its enormous layering capabilities and ability to display storyboards and a timeline simultaneously.
In a simple movie, you're working with two layers: the video layer that contains the moving pictures captured by your camcorder, and the audio layer containing the sound recorded with them. As you jazz up your home movie, you can add additional layers. Need music under your action? There's a third layer for that. How about some titles? Put 'em in another layer.
The more layers you have, the greater flexibility and creative freedom you have when putting together a movie. Most PC video-editing applications are limited to a handful of layers, but MovieShop Deluxe gives you a whopping 10 layers to work with.
Those extra layers come in handy because of the way MovieShop handles some editing functions -- for instance, placing titles over video. In programs like Apple's iMovie for the Mac, titles can be added without using layers. But with MovieShop, titles need to be placed in another layer and synchronized with your video.
Although MovieShop's abundance of layers can free your creative powers, the approach presumes a certain amount of user sophistication. If you know what you want to do in a video, you can probably figure out a way to do it in MovieShop. Novice users, however, may be baffled by the plethora of layers and options.
Similarly, MovieShop's simultaneous display of storyboards and timelines is a mixed blessing. Storyboards are thumbnails of the scenes or video clips in your movie, which you assemble by dragging them from MovieShop's media area to its storyline.
In addition to video segments, the storyline can include sound clips, transitions, still images, and titles. Whenever you drag a piece of media to the storyline, the program automatically creates a transition for it; the default is a dissolve, but substituting another of the numerous entries in MovieShop's transition gallery is as easy as dragging them to the storyline.
Keeping Track of Time
While it's easy to reorder clips by dragging and dropping them along the storyline, it's best to finalize their order before you begin adding sound and titles to your movie. Otherwise, you may be making some serious extra toil for yourself.
That's because items are pegged to clips using specific start and end points. For example, to place a title on a clip, you need to create the title in a separate layer. To synchronize the title and video clip, you must make sure that their start times match. If you move the clip in the storyline, its start time will fall out of sync with the title's, and the latter will need to be reset.
This problem is multiplied when you add a clip to the storyline after inserting multiple title and sound elements -- if you insert a new clip, all sounds and titles following it have to be resynchronized with their videos.
A movie's timeline is displayed below the storyline and layer bar (the tool that lets you navigate through your project's multiple layers). The timeline contains thumbnails of each frame below a filmstrip. Moving a "scrubber" along the filmstrip advances and rewinds the movie, which is displayed in a preview pane in the upper right of MovieShop's main window. You can also use the timeline to create slow- or fast-motion effects by stretching or compressing a clip's length.
