Products run the gamut at Digital World and beyond

The term “video editing” is much tossed around in the world of digital media, but only the cognoscenti or the innately curious know there is a vast range of products and configurations included in the term.

New video editing products shown at the Digital World conference in June allow desktop computer users, by definition, to digitize, store, and manipulate motion video. But each tool targets an appropriate user, delivering different capabilities to the home, the office and the professional video suite.

Compression to the people. The emerging generation of “moving JPEG” video compression and decompression chips and software performs motion video capture and display in real time from a video camera or video tape recorder. Aided by media integration software, such as Apple Computer’s new QuickTime extensions to System 7, video compression will enable significant chunks of motion video footage, with synchronized audio, to be stored on magnetic or optical computer disks and to be accessed randomly for editing.

DiVA’s VideoShop software ($595), which will be shipped at the same time as QuickTime, can display video clips on a Mac as moving-image thumbnails called “micons.” These micons can be rearranged in time and space to create a presentation sequence or “playout,” or a clip catalog. (Picture a slide sorter in which each “slide” is a motion video sequence).

Video networking for the office. Fluent Machines’ Fluency package (VSA-1000 AT-compatible board, $3,995, and Fluent Streams software, $495) can capture, compress and display multiple motion video/audio sequences in real time on a DOS/Windows AT-bus system. Each video window scales up or down automatically, based on what hardware is local to the receiver’s machine, and the digital video is designed to be transmitted effectively over a local area network.

‘Reely’ powerful. SuperMac Technology demonstrated VideoSpigot ($499) and VideoSpigot Pro ($1,899), QuickTime-compatible motion video frame grabbers for the Macintosh LC and IIsi systems. Each of these will be bundled initially, at no extra charge, with ReelTime, a powerful digital multimedia editing package. The VideoSpigot products are designed to display full-motion 30-frame-per-second video within a small window.

Later, SuperMac also plans to introduce Digital Film, a JPEG firmware compression package that can capture and display full-screen, full-motion video. Digital Film will be compatible with ReelTime. The two products are a potentially formidable bundle for $6,000 or so. A minute of compressed video will require something like 22 megabytes using the full-screen Digital Film product (your mileage may vary).

Going nonlinear. ReelTime can perform many of the functions executed by so-called digital nonlinear video editing systems, such as Avid Technology’s and Digital F/X’s Mac-based systems, shown at Digital World, and Editing Machines’ Emc2 MS-DOS-based product. These systems are explicitly marketed for videotape production and are in the $18,000 to $100,000 range, including the computer hardware.

Nonlinear editors use compressed video to permit disk-based random access (hence “nonlinear”) video editing, cut-and-paste style. They can represent a video production as parallel “film” clips displayed on a timeline. Sequencing segments, creating composites, inserting transitions and special effects, mixing audio, etc. can be represented graphically by dragging icons and thumbnail frames around the computer screen. Video editing with digital nonlinear editors, in other words, is to traditional linear tape editing what word processing or desktop publishing is to using a typewriter.

A video rough draft. With digital editing, there is no deterioration from each generation to the next, as there is with analog tape. The revision process is relatively painless, and turnaround is instant. Multiple video and audio segments are immediately available on disk without shuttling tapes back and forth, and digital transitions, special effects, graphics and animation can be integrated with digital live-action video.

The quality of video output from the compressed digital files is clearly a limitation of nonlinear editing. As new compression chips are delivered in the coming months, video quality may be upgraded from sub-VHS to industrial level.

Already ‘offline.’ Traditionally, video editing that does not go back to the source tape is called “offline editing.” Offline editing can be invaluable for making creative decisions, getting client feedback, showing proof-of-concept, and generating approval tapes before final production. It is essentially a rough draft mode.

Digital nonlinear editing, because of its flexibility and rapid turnaround but less-than-final-production quality, can already fill this “offline” role well. Nonlinear editing packages can display presentations directly on the computer screen or can convert their digital presentations to analog videotape for such uses. Nonlinear editors also have two methods for going back to the analog source tapes to assemble a final high-quality videotape master. (Neither of these paths is supported by ReelTime, by the way.)

The first method, emphasized by both Avid’s and Editing Machines’ nonlinear products, is to use the completed digital presentation to generate a machine-readable edit decision list (EDL) automatically, for “online” use on an editing suite at a post-production house. This EDL, a recipe for constructing a master tape from source tapes, automates to some extent the tedious linear tape editing process.

The EDL in control. The second final-production method is to create an EDL for the desktop system itself, which then controls source and record decks in order to “auto-assemble,” as it is called, a video product. Auto-assembly on the Mac is the recommended method of creating a master tape with the Video F/X system from Digital F/X.

Two systems shown at Digital World exemplify a nondigitized alternative for auto-assembling tapes. Both HSC’s MS-DOS-based SantaFe Video Editor (bundled with hardware, not sold retail) and Interactive Media Technologies’ more elaborate IMTX 8000 media controller box with Mac front end automatically log time codes as segments are defined. (The IMTX 8000 with two device controller boards plus the relevant software costs $7,995, not including the Macintosh.)

Software then permits the director to sequence the tape segments and special effects with frame accuracy, by editing a list referencing the time codes. The system can either auto-assemble or output an EDL, without ever digitizing the source tapes. While not as flexible and powerful as true nonlinear editing, this approach eliminates the need for extensive data storage.

An expanding presence. It seems likely that the new desktop video products will combine analog and digital techniques for tape editing for the time being and will eventually be widely used. As compressed digital video approaches the quality of industrial videotape, fully digital editing methods can be expected to prevail in the industrial training and marketing sector first, rather than in low-end consumer applications, where the hardware is too expensive, or in high-end broadcast production, where the quality is inadequate. Simultaneously, motion video windows are likely to become common in desktop computer presentations and applications.

Bernard Banet