Movavi VideoSuite Edition 3.1

Sometimes, it takes a software company from across the ocean to give a typical American user what he wants in a program: something that just works in a hurry without a lot of hassle. VideoSuite Edition 3.1, from Novosibirsk, Russiabased Movavi, is six such programs. The “digital aficionados” who started Movavi just two years ago describe their development strategy as “making video editing and processing as simple as brewing coffee or using a blender.” Using VideoSuite isn’t quite that easy, but it’s close.

Where video is concerned, if you’re mostly interested in quickly putting decent-looking video up on YouTube, converting and transferring video to an iPod or PSP (with custom settings), or creating bare-bones movies with few bells or whistles, this suite excels. If you want to output your own Scorsese masterpiece, look elsewhere. VideoSuite doesn’t offer the kind of fine-tuning and tweaking you’ll need. The editing options are primarily limited to just 11 filters; six effects; automatic contrast, saturation, and white balance settings; and a Magic Enhancer tool.

Conversely, the program’s interface is wonderfully straightforward, with just six buttons that point to common video-related tasks. Categories cover creating a CD/DVD, converting video (not encrypted/copy-protected data, however), transferring video to a mobile device (iPod, PSP, cell phone, PDA), editing video, splitting video, and joining videos. Although saves between changes on a 2.4GHz Athlon 64 3700+ rig (Windows XP, 80GB hard drive, 2GB of RAM) were frustratingly long at times and edited video outputs to just AVI, MPEG, and WMV files, each of VideoSuite’s tools are good choices when
you don’t want (or need) to invest much time or effort into the final product.

You can output converted video to the usual file formats, plus 3GPP and 3GPP2 files, and if you get stuck, the Help section is among the best I’ve seen. You can also extract songs from soundtracks fairly easily, and the minimum usage requirements (1.5GHz-plus CPU, WinXP/2000, 256MB of RAM, 1GB hard drive space) aren’t too demanding. Overall, VideoSuite is friendly enough for your parents to use (and stop bugging you) but hearty enough to give you six right-to-the-point apps for about $10 each.

[tags]Video Suite, Movavi[/tags]