Aero Quartet has released version 3 of SimpleMovieX, its Mac OS X movie editor. With a QuickTime Pro-like feature set, SimpleMovieX extends editing capabilities to other popular video formats AVI, Google Video, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. The main advantage of native editing is speed and quality, since no re-encoding is required to save edited movies.
This new version also supports Chapters, a simple way to structure long movies and split them into clips, a Batch Converter, and Audio Waveform tool to make sharp audio editing and synchronization. SimpleMovieX (US$30) also provides a search pane to quickly find a sequence and an adaptable timeline for accurate playhead positioning even in large duration movies. Huge files beyond 4GB, for example 6 hours of TV recording, can be edited without truncating.
For occasional users, an unlimited demo version of SimpleMovieX is available for free download.
SimpleMovieX requires Mac OS X v10.3 or higher. QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component is required to take advantage of MPEG-2 capabilities. QuickTime Pro is not required.
More info: http://www.aeroquartet.com/SimpleMovieX/
sounds cool …
anyone have any experience with this app ??
does it work as advertised ?
The “Aero” threw me at first.
I wish Apple would allow (for a fee if necessary) MPEG-2 content to play in iTunes and aTV, so I could play EyeTV content without having to do the long converts.
By total coincidence, I just bought this app this past weekend. (It’s version 3.0).
Review:
I like it for the most part, as it allows me to edit out commercials (to save HD space) from the Tivo’d programs I want to save, and it’s a little more precise than QT Pro, plus has added features like the thumbnail view of frames, jumping from frame-to-frame or keyframe-to-keyframe, which is extremely excellent, if a little poorly executed.
As I say, it works fine, but it has also some strange behaviour when trying to zoom the timeline in and out, as well as scroll the timeline back and forth (the developer has chosen not to use scrollbars, for some strange reason). I have been playing with it a lot these last few days, with QT MPEG4 files of 4+ GB and up to 7 hours in length. I definitely say that it is a good purchase, as long as you are not expecting iMovie/FCP-like control, but want more power -and frankly, a better UI- than QT Pro offers.
One other strange thing that happened was that a newer version of “3.0” was released just a couple of days ago, but the developer has put nothing on his website to indicate any changes from the version “3.0” that I downloaded over the weekend. I can’t find any obvious differences between the two versions however.
I sent an email of thanks to the developer when I bought it, and he is a very nice guy who responded very quickly to my email. I think this is going to be a good app. going forward, after a few UI tweaks. It’s worth the $30, especially if you do not already own QT Pro.
/review