According to Forrester Research (via Popular Photography Magazine), 53% of PC owners in the U.S. view and manage photos on their PC, while only 2% of the same PC owners edit videos.
I find stats like these misleading, since there is an implied correlation between the two numbers when in fact there is none. It is the same as if someone claims: Soccer players score x% of all goals during the second half of a game, while they play y% of all passes with their right foot. It makes for two interesting numbers, but nothing more.
It would be much more interesting to compare what percentage of PC users edited videos vs. photos or what percentage viewed photos and/or videos. But then we are not in the statistics business, so we don’t know what numbers and comparisons people really love to see no matter how useful they turn out to be…
Cinemek’s Hitchcock is one of these iPhone apps that simply wows you from the first time you hear about it. Just the potential of being able to create a video storyboard on an iPhone had me salivating. As an added benefit, since I’m working on a similar project for work right now and know how difficult developing a storyboard can be, I knew I would get my hands on Hitchcock and try it out. To say it upfront – I got hooked and did not regret any of the many minutes I spent with this app!
Upon first glance, I was intimidated by the user interface – it’s not clear what you should do first and what comes next. I started to tap around and quickly got lost. Then I did what I recommend every new user should do – go to Cinemek’s site and watch their great tutorials. Once done, it was pretty easy to get my first project set up and going.
Position the camera and movements, then add people and arrows how they should move throughout the scene. Finish by adding written or audio notes.
Here’s how Hitchcock works:
- Take a number of photos with your camera or select existing photos from the camera roll. If you still like to draw, create your drawings, then take pictures of the drawings with your iPhone camera.
- Each selected photo is added to the storyboard as a panel. You can simply drag panels around to re-arrange them.
- Tap on a panel to open the panel editor.
- In the panel editor, select your camera movement (zooms, pans, etc. – tilt is not supported yet) for the scene from the left menu.
- Place people or movement icons from the right menu and use the bottom menu to make adjustments (people icons: gender, profile; movement arrows: rotate, flip)
- On the bottom, sequence the panel, add desired time (will be used for the animation playback) and add audio, as desired. You can also enter text notes.
- Rinse and repeat for every panel.
- Once done, return to the storyboard, where you can watch an animation of all the panels and add notes to each panel.
- Once the project is done. Save it and then export it to PDF.
- As part of the export, Hitchcock uploads the PDF to Cinemek’s servers, then allows you to send an email with a link to yourself (or anybody involved in the project.)
Done!
Exported storyboard
Once you master the interface, creating storyboards with Hitchcock is great fun. I kept adding scenes, playing around with the camera positions and movements, split scenes into sub-scenes and got so much sucked in that I simply forgot about time. If this is how addicting Hitchcock can be to a wanna-be movie-maker, it does not take a lot to imagine how great a productivity tool Hitchcock is to someone doing this for a living.
What’s missing? Not a lot:
- No camera tilt
- While it is great to be able to export the storyboard as a PDF, I’d like to also be able to export the movie, so I can watch it on my Mac or show to multiple people at once.
- Similarly, I’d like to be able to export any audio for any of the scenes.
Verdict: Highly Recommended and an easy Editor’s Pick!
Price: $19.95 from iTunes.
Apple has started to seed the iPhone 3.1 SDK to developers. According to Gizmodo, the seed version of the SDK includes, among other things, access to video editing for third-party developers and nondestructive editing by allowing to save copies of a video.
This is one area that we predicted developers would get access to during the summer, so we will see video editing apps popping up in the App Store very soon. In our opinion, we will see “simple” editing apps first, from filters to cropping, before more advanced apps (special effects, transitions) will go all the way to editing on a timeline or even transcoding. But then, this might happen much faster than I think would be possible – after all, I just had to eat my own words that specialized photo editing would not be coming to the iPhone soon (in this case, in the form of stitching panoramas).
Also, non-destructive editing will clearly be a big driver for purchases of the 32GB iPhone 3GS.
You will shoot video with your iPhone 3Gs. You know it is inevitable. Some of it you will want to keep. A smaller amount of the videos will actually be ones you want to refine and show to friends and relatives more extensively–for instance you shoot some video of your vacation and you want to make it endurable for consumption by your friends and family.
What do you do, if like most people, you don’t have the time or the willingness to learn video editing and don’t want to spend time singling out the highlights and cutting the rest and want to create a music soundtrack without having to synch the music to the video yourself?
The answer might be a program called ‘Reveal’ by Muvee.
Muvee has been around for almost 10 years (maybe longer, but I first learned about them around 2000), and does something better than any other company I know: it takes your raw video, detects faces and other key elements, and automatically edits your raw video into a finished video with edits automatically synched to the music you choose.
Personalization in Muvee
All you have to do is contained in four steps: feed in the raw video clips you want to create the edited video from; choose the style you want (based on the type of video you are creating and the mood you want to evoke); add the music (one or more common music files you want to use), and hit ‘create’. Reveal does the rest. You can output in a variety of file formats based on where you want to post the video and how you want to distribute it.
The program costs $99 direct from Muvee, and cheaper from Amazon
and other online retailers. As always, if you decide to buy, please do it through our site. It costs you nothing extra and gives us more funds to keep the site going. That may seem a lot of money to spend in the age of free iPhone apps, but I don’t know of any cheaper alternative that does what Reveal does in so easy a process and with as much automation and quality.
I’ve used older versions (formerly called “Autoproducer”) and can attest to its miraculous ability to take your intermittently interesting videos and make them much more watchable and compelling.
If you want to save your valuable time and create memories that you don’ t have to apologize for in advance, try Muvee’s Reveal.
Note: As with all the products we recommend, we have no commercial relationship with the company.
