Setting Up Your Encoding Software - A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression - page 512

Table 30-8 Power Tools for Compression Assistance (Continued)

Product Description

Apple Shake If money is no object, you might use Shake to fix some

problems. It is designed as a compositing tool for Hollywood
movies but it also has capabilities in the video realm. It
supports complex compositing filters and of course it is key-
frame controlled so you could use it to make that vital
correction on your movie clip. However, it is probably not
worth buying Shake to use as an occasional fix-it tool. But if
you already have it installed, you might not have thought of it
as a power tool for fixing problems in your video.

Ultimatte You may be able to pull a moving matte off of the presenter

and do a background replacement to get rid of some unwanted
motion complexity. That would reduce the bit rate required to
compress your footage.

Apple Keynote Since Keynote can create a movie as an export, you might use it

to render insert sequences and title fragments.

Microsoft PowerPoint See Keynote above. PowerPoint exports to a QuickTime movie

when it is being used on the Mac OS platform There are some
issues with transitions not rendering properly if the frame
rates are not high enough and getting the slide duration
timings correct is tricky.

Motion Director An image-stabilizing application for Windows that reduces the

movement due to handheld shooting by detecting unwanted
camera movement in your video files. It uses a statistical
analysis technique to stabilize the image during playback.

MPEG2Works This is a general-purpose, “Swiss-Army-knife” kind of tool for

converting a variety of formats. It also converts between NTSC
and PAL, but it is currently only available on Mac OS X.

Womble Multimedia MPEG Video Wizard and MPEG-VCR are two tools, which are

designed for fixing up MPEG files. MPEG-VCR is reputed to
have a very good GOP fixer for when you want to prep files for
burning onto a DVD. This software is for Windows only.

Mireth MacSVCD This is a suite of Mac OS-based tools for manipulating video so

it will fit the SVCD format. There are various MPEG-2- and
DivX-based encoding utilities provided, including the Apple
MPEG-2 playback component.

Digital Film Lab This is a suite of tools that plug into Final Cut Pro and provide

a way to create film like effects. It is made by a company called
Digital Film Tools.