| In an age where
movies are such an important part of our daily lives, people are buying
video cameras to make their own movies. By far, special effects have come
to play a major part in the motion picture industry.
Wouldn't it be great if you could use special effects to enhance your home movies? Or even a school project. A common thought is that you have to have thousands of dollars worth equipment to edit and/or enhance your videos, while all you really need is your Personal Computer, a video camera, and the software. Presto! Multimedia Suite will let you do things you've only dreamed of! There are several products on the market designed with editing videos in mind. One of these programs is Adobe Premiere, but is not only designed for more high-end jobs, but can also be quite pricy. There is another program called Presto! Multimedia Suite. It is not only easy to use and practicle for use at home, but only runs $80 at local computer stores. Compared to programs running several hundred dollars, it is intended more so for use at home. Presto! is a suite of programs that will help you not only create great videos, but also to help in image editing and manipulation. It includes a program to manage your scanning and OCR, and another to play CD's. MPEG files, and almost anyother multimedia file under the sun. By far, the hear of this suite is Presto! Video Works. This allows you to create and edit your own digital videos. At first, the program seems to lack much functionality, but as you start to play with it, and look over the documentation, you start to realize its power. The first thing you see is the video editing area. This is where you actually edit your .avi files and can see the fruits of your work. Directly above this window is the infamous toolbar. Here you can find your tools, such as "crop", "resize", and even "change video format." From here you can also import sounds for the video, and look at a frame-by- frame display of your work, to aid in making cuts. Quickly, some of the other features include custom frame rates, the ability to apply the emboss, mirror, invert, and mosaic filters, and even to include overlays and chromakey effects. Another neat feature of Video Works is the ability to do what they call "magic." This feature allows not only for overlays, but the ability to zoom, rotate, and pan your videos. With a few clicks of your trusty mouse, you can do things like overlaying pictures of your family with pictures of newspaper articles or spots on the local news that they might have been involved with. This is one of those things that you really have to see to believe. Have you wanted to play with your pictures, but simply can't afford those high-priced image editing utilities? Presto! also comes with ImageFolio, which, in a nutshell, is Adobe Photoshop, economy size. It has all the functionability and features that you would expect from a high-dollar program, like your various resizing, rotating, and inverting tools, as well as the fairly standard paintbrush, gradient, curve, smudge, and text tools, to name a few. The Palette Control window lets you select almost any color of the rainbow to use for your fill or drawing color. It only takes a few clicks of the mouse to make yourself tower over the New York Skyline. I was able to accomplish this within a day of installing the program. Of course, it all depends from person to person. While we're thinking about image editing, it is interesting to note that Presto! comes bundled with a slightly watered-down version of Kai's Power GOO, which is a really neat program that lets you distort pictures very eaisly, and is a ton of fun to play around with. Overall, Presto! Multimedia Suite is a definate best buy for anyone wanting to create home videos that will impress their entire family. Once again, Presto! is produced by NewSoft, and is available at CompUSA for around $70.
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