14 DAY TRIAL // Amazing thing the technology nowadays. Computers and Internet allow users to do a great deal of things like sending messages to the "end" of the world in a matter of seconds or creating personal videos, listen to music, play games, do your work very easy and cheap etc. And for some time now you can to join videos of different formats into a single file or create great slide shows from the pictures on your computer.
I remember the time when merging videos used to be a pretty tiresome and time consuming activity. Money was not on the table for me, as I always used freeware softwares to do my video joining (the developers had a very powerful intrinsic motivation and did a great job with the coding). My desires at the time went pretty high and involved adding effects to the video. Now that nobody gives a damn on this matter there is a myriad of applications to do it with.
Most of them have commercial license and the price varies between $15 to almost $30. There are more expensive softwares that do a terrific job but they are in the professional category of video editing and some of them cost a small fortune. The results however, are absolutely fantastic.
For home use AVI MPEG WMV Joiner is a nice and easy to use tool to do your video merging. As the name suggests, AVI, MPEG and WMV/ASF are the only video formats supported. Some of you may see it as a downside, but these are actually the most popular formats for offline use. The price of the application is $21.95 and the only limitation imposed by the user in the trial version is the logo inserted in the converted video.
The intuitive interface is not at all intricate and a beginner should have absolutely no problem with handling the software. There are two types of jobs available. One for joining video and converting into a single format and the other one is designed to create slide shows using the pictures and photos stored on your computer.
Joining the videos is an easy task and all there is to it is add the supported files, set the order of the merger using the up/down left side arrows and click Start. There are no settings to be made, no aspect ratio, no framerate adjusting as the application will "level" all the files and bring them to common values. A preview button is available. At the beginning I thought it would show me the output result or at least the first two movies, but it will just play the item selected in the video window.
You can add as many files as you want, but you should take it easy as the final result may take more space than expected and the process could take a while. Make some tests first. In my case, four video files summing a total of 7.25 MB resulted into a single file of a little over 30 MB. The process did not take more than a couple of minutes.
When selecting the output format you are presented with the three options (AVI, MPEG and WMV) and a list of codecs you would like to use for the compression. The downside in this case is that you cannot configure the codecs in any way.
Creating slide shows is not an inch more difficult, but there is a little setting more to do in here. After selecting one picture, you can set the duration of showing the photo (if there is one image you are not keen on, you can always set a smaller amount of time to be displayed), choose the desired transition (there are 32 options available) and set the duration for the transition. The user can also add an audio file to be played in the background. The supported files are MP3 and WAV.
The downside resides in the fact that only the names will give you a hint on the effect and there is no preview window, so that you know what you are doing.
The Good
The interface is user friendly and a beginner should get along very well with it. The best feature in the software is by far the Photo to Video tool.
The Bad
The user cannot make any adjustments to how the codec will work. During the testing the software crashed once.
The slide show creation does not allow a preview of the transition effect.
The Truth
I had high expectations from the software as I first noticed the price. I thought that for $22 I would have more freedom for configuring the joining process.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
