Pinnacle VideoSpin – At a glace

Just wanted to briefly mention a free video editing program I am playing with at the moment. It is a free but slightly feature poor program that I guess can be thought of as Pinnacle Studio’s smaller brother. Despite this, it is a fantastic and simple application for editing all manner of video files and exporting in a variety of formats. Whilst I have only been encoding into DVD (i.e. MPEG-2) there are also options for iPods and the Sony PSP. The best thing about the program is the way it automatically breaks up video streams into segments based on scene changes. This makes editing out commercials from recordings or clean cut editing (i.e. without manually going frame by frame) child’s play.

The only downside it the processing and encoding appears to be single threaded which is a massive let down and there is no direct option to make DVD compliant data structures. Despite this, if you need to casually edit video files and have been wading through pages of useless google results looking for the right program – give VideoSpin a try. 🙂

Presentation: 8/10 – Great, everything is clearly and intuitively laid out.

Features: 6/10 – Nice range of export formats, but some are lacking. Feature poor compared to commercial version.

Power: 6/10 – Fast, but annoyingly only single threaded, Dual and Quad cores will be left underutilised.

Overal: 8/10 – Great program, shame about the limitations.