Just ran into this video by Chris Pirillo where he gives his opinion on the ZS4 free cross platform video editor.
If you want to check it out for yourself, here is the download link ZS4 Video Editor
Here is a mini tutorial by TalentedPixie.com about how to apply effects in Adobe Premiere CS3. It should also allow you to get a sense about how Adobe Premiere (and many other video editors) works. Take into account that this is a piece of software targeted to professionals, so you probably will not be seeing a very intuitive and clean User Interface (UI), but a more packed and efficiency driven one. That should not scare you though, once you get around the ropes with it, you will be doing things much faster and much easier. Then you will appreciate why the interface is like that.
I just heard of the AVS Video Editor (and the AVS Suite in general) and decided to give it a try. The concept seems great, register one of their products and get all of them immediately. At almost $60, it seems like a reasonable price. I played with it for a while and here is the result (made with the default sample clips and audio):
This was uploaded directly after rendering without any extra processing
You can download your free copy here.
The features are not the greatest, but they seem to work fine. There are many prepackaged effects and transitions that add a lot of eye candy to your videos. There were some features missing, specially for more professional video editing jobs, like the lack of a precise time and frames control. For example, if you want an effect to last for 5 seconds, you have to calculate it yourself looking at the timeline and just approximate it. The user interface is not all that intuitive, but without looking at the help I was able to get most of it done and I believe I tried almost all of the features for the editing part. When it comes down to video editing, I would like a little more flexibility, but if you do not mind just going with the presets for the most part and just want to get a decent looking video in a short amount of time, this might be the software for you.
There are other features you might be interested in, for example, it has a wide variety of exporting formats, from straight to DVD quality to straight to YouTube and everything in between. I did not try for a full HD video, but it might be possible. The video above is in fact rendered in 720p. Of course the quality is not that great because it is made with low quality clips, but it is possible to do HD with this software.
I was pleased with the rendering speed and the support for h.264. Overall it looks like a good possibility for the price. If you are looking to upgrade from Movie Maker to a nonlinear video editing software, this is for you. If you want to make your home videos spicier without spending a fortune or a lot of time, this is for you.
OVERALL SCORE: 3.5 out of 5
Loiloscope is a freestyle non-linear video editing software. This is, unlike other video editing software packages, Loiloscope uses a virtually unlimited desktop where you can arrange and organize your clips while editing them. It comes in two versions, one of them free. The only limitations for the free version are the watermark and the video output size constraint.
Loiloscope uses a simple yet very flexible interface that allows both on-the-fly and precise to the frame editing. Probably the best feature of Loiloscope is that you are not limited by the environment. Other software uses a cramped window where they try to fit everything the multi functional editor needs. The screen real state goes away fast with any of this packages. Loiloscope on the other side uses the screen flow to its best. You might not be able to see everything in this workspace at once if you do not have a gigantic display, but with the smart focus feature, you do not need to. You can focus and zoom into any part of the workspace with the roll of the mouse wheel or a single click.
Here you can see their introduction video. It is a bit long, and not the best editing ever (ironically enough), but hopefully you will see all the possibilities of this piece of software:
Loiloscope is produced by Loilo Inc. a Japanese startup funded by Koji Sugiyama and Ryutaro Sugiyama in 2007. Based on the Ecou engine for lightning fast video rendering and the ScopeUI for that ’so simple you do not need a manual’ interface.
