There are numerous consumer grade video editing programs that are perfect for the videographer who wants to share videos on YouTube that are more polished than usual or who wants to enter the occasional video competition. Here are five of the best amateur friendly video edition programs I have utilized to edit YouTube videos, Associated Content videos, and to enter video contests:
Windows Movie Maker
Windows Movie Maker has a few different versions. The version on your particular PC will depend on what version of Windows you currently have installed. The Windows Movie Maker on Vista is very robust in terms of video editing. There is a bevy of features for adding transitions, fades, wipes, subtitles, and titles. It is easy to become adjusted to the program operation and to fully utilize the various options available.
Windows Live Movie Maker
The Windows Live Movie Maker is a free download available for any user who wants access. This program isn’t quite as full featured as the previous versions of Windows Movie Maker. It also isn’t as intuitive. This program is best suited to quick clips, merges, and adding transitions for fast video upload to web-sites.
Adobe Premiere Elements 8
Adobe Premiere Elements is a slightly less full featured version of commercial Adobe software. The program usually updates every one to two years which can be a bit overwhelming in terms of the financial situation of an amateur videographer. Many users also complain about the addition of ads to the software. This program does offer anything the average user would want including chromo key.
Corel Video Pro X3
If you are used to using many of the other options on this list, then the Corel Video program is going to require a bit of a learning curve in terms of getting used to a new interface with slightly different terminology for the various features.
Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9
This program is a bit of a borderline program that straddles the gap between the Windows movie versions and the more advanced options of Adobe Premiere Elements and Corel Video. It offers mostly the same options you can get in Windows movie maker while providing a software program that is a great deal more visually sophisticated. Since this program carries a price tag of near $100.00 many of the other options in this article would be better suited depending on your individual needs.
The consumer looking for a video editing program has to closely assess their needs in a video editing program, and then purchase the program that best suits these needs at a bargain price.
Sources:
Personal Experience with each program.
What does this mean for software development? Building a great product and user experience are more important now than ever. The barriers to entry are so few, and the available tools so plenty, that we can expect to see many competitors for every use case. Apps may only get a single chance to impress users. Users can evaluate and compare apps quickly, with very little time or money lost.
Software will spread virally more than ever before, but it will be increasingly done in person and off the Web. The fact that our phones are always with us means we are constantly talking to friends and coworkers about the apps that we actually find worth using. Neither first mover advantages nor inflated marketing budgets will be able to compensate for products that cannot stand on their own.
App Pricing Models
In addition to starting with a great product, apps will need to be where users are looking for them – everywhere. The software we will interact with on a daily basis will be expected to integrate wherever we already are. The competitive advantage of great software in the future will not just be in its utility, or UX, but in its pervasiveness. Selling points such as presence in web and mobile app stores, availability of browser and mail client plugins and integration with other 3rd party apps and devices will be important variables in purchasing decisions, and will increasingly make the difference between evaluations and sales.
The success of the iOS and Android app stores has proven that users are willing to purchase relatively cheap mobile apps that serve a single purpose. Although the apps are varied, there are a handful of pricing models which have become common for applications that are available for multiple devices:
- The freemium subscription model: Free but limited versions of web and mobile apps, with options to upgrade to a paid version. Examples include Pandora, Evernote, Prey and Dropbox.
- Free mobile apps which support a physical device, like Sonos, Boxee, or MiCommand.
- Free mobile apps that are primarily content delivery vehicles which drive revenue elsewhere, like Kindle and Netflix
- Free apps which are a “value add” for services like Salesforce or E*TRADE.
- Apps which are free on the web, but require a paid subscription to access the mobile apps, such as Lastpass and Remember The Milk. A very interesting experiment on the question of what users value enough to pay for, this essentially makes the web apps loss leaders for the mobile apps. I believe this will become a successful and popular model for the balancing act of limiting functionality while still gaining traction. Last.fm recently announced its transition to this model.
Implications
The reluctance of software developers to adopt an “everywhere” strategy likely relates to not only the development time required, but also the support. If users come to rely on a Firefox plugin and iPhone app, even if they have not paid a dime they will expect updates and support. However, many companies are proving the profitability of the stickiness this philosophy provides. Its important to remember there is more at play here than stickiness – if an application isn’t where its market is, someone else will be.
One way in which software companies can bypass the laborious task of coding for different environments is in Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions such as Appcelerator and Particle Code. Although adoption is not widespread at the moment, solutions like these may soon be viable alternatives to dedicating developers to separate platforms. Another option is to simply bypass platforms completely and create app-like experiences using HTML5. Aside magazine and the startup OnSwipe are examples of the possibilities available for content publishers outside of app stores, which is attractive for various reasons.
Closing
You’ve probably heard of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the speech recognition software for PC and Mac that lets you do the talking, and it types everything you say. Now the new version 11.5 has been released, and it lets you use an iPhone as your microphone. I installed the PC version of the software and downloaded the Nuance remote mic iPhone app to see how well it works.
Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 11 for PC (and the Mac version, called Dragon Dictate, with similar features and the same speech recognition engine) was released last September, and its claim to fame was a significant increase in its speech-to-text accuracy. The speech recognition engine in this version 11.5 is the same as in version 11. It requires little training, and can not only transcribe everything you say, but it lets you navigate your computer and bark out commands such as “search Google for rubber baby buggy bumpers,” and it immediately opens up your default browser, enters your terms in Google and searches away.
Until now, you needed to connect a microphone, preferably a wired USB headset mic, to make Dragon achieve its peak accuracy. The main innovation in this new version, which is available for PC now and will be soon for Mac, is the way it lets you use your iPhone’s stock earbuds/mic as a microphone, resulting in sound quality that’s at least as good as that of a USB mic. This is a good thing, because Bluetooth mics just don’t work well enough for speech recognition. But the iPhone app doesn’t use Bluetooth — it communicates with your computer over Wi-Fi, resulting in better mic sound quality — which ultimately means better accuracy.
Setting up the iPhone 4 to use its mic is simple. After a quick download of the free Nuance iPhone app [iTunes link] from the App Store, I launched the Dragon NaturallySpeaking PC application, and using the connectivity software Bonjour (which is included in iTunes), it automatically paired up with the NaturallySpeaking software on my PC. If you don’t wish to install Bonjour, you can enter your computer’s IP address, and I tried configuring it that way which worked equally well:
Once the software and iPhone were paired, I tapped the icon on the iPhone app and it activated the microphone. After a 5-minute guided training session that amounted to just testing of the microphone, the software was ready to go. I placed the iPhone in my pocket and I could stroll around the room, talking normally as each of my words and commands were immediately typed on the screen. It worked beautifully, with accuracy that was even better than the best wired USB microphone I’ve been using over the past few years with NaturallySpeaking.
A note about NaturallySpeaking software: It’s not for everyone. It works best for people who speak distinctly, and even though it does transcribe quite well even if you utter separate phrases with frequent pauses, it hits its highest accuracy level if you speak in complete sentences. Increasing accuracy further is the ability to train the software by introducing it to documents and emails you’ve written, and it learns your vocabulary.
While you’re training NaturallySpeaking to learn the words and phrases you use most often, the software is training you at the same time. You learn to speak in complete sentences, and even to think in paragraphs. It can even have a profound effect on your writing style, making it more conversational. I use it for everything I write. In fact, I wrote most of an 70,000 word book with Dragon, where I hardly typed a single character. I noticed after I’d used it for a few years that its accuracy is pushing 99%. It’s just uncanny.
Beyond that iPhone Microphone trick, version 11.5 is packed with small upgrades throughout the interface, including new commands that work with Facebook and Twitter. For example, you can say “tweet,” after which it opens a box on your desktop like this:
Then, whatever you say after that is typed into the box. Say “OK”, and NaturallySpeaking sends what you just uttered to your Twitter account. It works similarly for Facebook. It’s a kick, and it’s a huge productivity enhancer on all fronts.
To use this iPhone remote mic app, you must purchase the premium version (or above, and as I mentioned, the Mac version is not available yet) of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, $179.99 for the software download, or $199.99 for the boxed version. It’s worth it — I think this technology is excellent, bordering on miraculous. If you have an iPhone and can’t type as quickly as you can talk, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 might be the best $179.99 you’ve ever spent.
This entry was posted on 27.07.2011 at 1:03 дп and is filed under software . Tagged: software . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.
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