Video effects & system specs
Edition has a single button for applying dissolve transition effects to the timeline, allowing users to choose duration and decide whether the effect should start, end, or be centred on the cut. More elaborate transitions can be accessed through Edition's Project window.There's a huge selection of fades and wipes, plus many categories of crazy 2D and 3D slides, swaps, flips and peels. Hollywood FX Plus RT and Alpha Magic FX gradient wipes are also bundled, to extend the options.
If extreme transition effects are wanted, turn to the supplied Hollywood FX RT With V5.5 of Edition, Pinnacle introduced two types of video effects - Classic, requiring rendering, and real-time that make use of graphics acceleration or processor power to give real-time playback. With Liquid Edition 6 and the new graphics card we fitted for it into our V5.5 editing PC, even some classic effects played back in real-time, and the selection would have been wider, we think, had we been running a faster PC.
As with V 5.5, effects editors include 2D and 3D control panels for picture-in-picture effects, and a selection of colour-correction tools including the classic editor (straightforward and easy to understand) and a far more complex interface with waveform displays, vectorscopes, and primary and secondary colour-adjusting tools.
The full set of colour-correction tools offers a lot of power, but is not for the novice There’s a wipe editor, too, plus a keying editor for bluescreen and greenscreen effects. The integrated TitleDeko RT applet has a neat interface for creating static, rolling and crawling titles, with a choice of text styles and options for adding geometric shapes and graphics.
What has changed, and it’s significant, is the addition in V6’s effects tools of Bezier curves for smoother keyframing, and a new ability to apply video and audio effects to entire tracks rather than just individual clips – similar to the option in Sony's Vegas video editor.
Keyframing with Bezier curves has been added to 2D and 3D effects editors, providing, for instance, first-class control for animated picture-in-picture effects
System requirements
Standard (HDV editing) for LE 6 and LE6 Pro Windows XP; DirectX 9.0c; free compatible USB 2.0 port for LE 6 Pro hardware; OHCI-compliant FireWire port for software-only version; 1.8GHz processor (3GHz); 512MByte RAM (1GByte); DirectX 9-compatible 4x/64MByte AGP graphics card (8x/128MByte AGP); hard drive with sustained data rate of 10MByte/sec; sound card
Review system
Windows XP Pro (with SP2); Asus A7N8X motherboard with integrated Nvidia nForce2 USB 2.0 chipset and Realtek ALC650 six-channel amplifier, audio processor and Dolby Digital AC-3 encoder; 2.16GHz AMD Athlon XP 3000+ processor; 768MByte DDR Ram; 120GByte hard drive for system and software; 160GByte hard drive for video; 128MByte ATI Radeon 9600 Pro All-In-Wonder graphics card (used in place of non-compatible 128MByte Nvidia GeForce FX 5600XT card); two Liteon LitePanel 150 TFT monitors
Also used for the review
Liquid Edition 6.1 beta (build 3948); Sony DSR-11 DVCAM VCR; Philips 17PF9945 17in widescreen TFT TV set
