As a kid, I remember being fascinated by the educational TV shows that would present everything in a pleasant way, so that even an adult would forget about every day problems, and begin traveling in Wonderland.

An aspect that I really liked was the way the producers managed to edit the movie clips, and make it look like all actions came one after another, in one smooth compilation.

Technology makes it now easy for any user to create personalized cool effects and transitions for your home videos.

I’m going to talk about Video Edit Magic, a program that will enable you to give a professional look to your amateur videos.


Let's go backstage!

The program’s interface is not friendly for a beginner’s eye, but it doesn’t take long for you to get to know it better. It allows you to capture, and edit audio and video software, making it a complete media solution for every "household".

When working with it, you have to load your media files into the program’s collection. Here, there are three tabs that contain associated items: media files, video effects, and video transitions.

In order for you to be able to edit the files, you have to drag them to the timeline section. Here you can link two or more files together, and you can add transition effects between them.

What I like about it is the fact that it offers you a predefined set of effects and transitions, and all you have to do is click the one that suits you best.

Among the effects that you can add to your files are: fade in/out, pixelate, blur, wave, emboss/engrave, posterize, text/title, pan/zoom, animated transform, and more. I especially like the text/tile effect, which allows you to add a title to the movie. You can use this as an opening title, or as a closing credit (or both), and set the basis of a promising filming career.

The timeline section allows you to set the time for each effect, transition, audio, and video file. You can resize the file size, but this will result in a pitch adjustment for your files. You can, however trim your video and audio files, so that you can cut out the parts that present no interest anymore.

In the Video transitions tab you can choose one of available effects: chroma key color, non red, luminance, hue, picture in picture, wipe, triangle wipe, v wipe, sawtooth wipe, special wipe, arrowhead wipe, shape wipe, checker board, stretch, Iris, and much more.

I like the fact that for each video effect and transition there’s a short description, which gives you an idea about what it does. Also, if the short description doesn’t make it clear enough for you what the output will be, you can preview the effect, and you’ll no longer be clueless.

You can remove the original sound from your movie, and load another audio file; also, you can add a narration to your movie, making it look like you’re copying the memories from your brain straight onto the PC. When doing this, the program allows you to either load a separate audio file with your voice, or you can record the narration as the video is played, so that you can get a better result.

What’s nice about the program is the fact that it allows you to import video from a digital camera or camcorder, or record it from a webcam or firewire capture device. You also have the chance to export your work to a digital video camera.

Video Edit Magic allows you to convert your media files to different formats, and gives you a nice little wizard which intermediates the whole process.

You can save your work as a project file, and get back to editing it later on (this will keep the timeline settings, as well as all the transitions and effects), and when you’re done you can create your movie; the available formats are: AVI, MPEG, WMV/WMA, Digital video AVI, MOV or WAVE (for audio files only); you can choose the audio and video codecs that you want to use, as well as the movie dimensions, framerate; for a faster preferences set-up you can use one of the available presets: best quality, high compression, most compatible.

The Good

Video Edit Magic offers you a good alternative for your home video editing needs, but not only. You can select video, audio and images to use for your work, and the effects and transitions that you can choose from give you a good starting point. You don’t have to be familiar with video editing in order to be able to give your videos a fine touch, and if you should bump into any problems, use the help menu with confidence, since it has plenty of information and explanations.

The Bad

The program is a little slow when working with the timeline, effects and it will give you the feeling that it’s about to crash at any moment (but don’t worry: it’s stable, and you won’t go through this experience). Rendering a movie doesn’t take too long, and even though it shows a long ETA at first, the operation is completed in seconds (it takes about 10 seconds for a 5 minute AVI movie to be rendered). The demo version places an annoying tag on your movies, and after 30 days the Save project, Capture, Export to DV camera and Conversion features are disabled.

The Truth

It’s fun to work with this program, and there are many "toys" that you can play with; you’ll feel like a big-time producer when loading the effects and transitions. Even though it may seem hard to get around at first, after a second glance you will have no trouble at all. No video editing experience is required, and all the effects are predefined, so you only have to use them, and not waste time with advanced configurations. The price for the full version is pretty good for this class, but if you have a low budget, simply use the trial version and have some fun!


Check out the screenshots below to get a glance at the program in action:

Installing:


Working with the program: