Product Reviews

So you need a video editor. iMovie won't do it for you, but Final Cut Express can be daunting. Welcome to Norrkross Movie from Swedish developer Martin Wennerberg, which slots in nicely between the two.

The application presents itself in a single window, comprising the Main playback window, the Timeline at the bottom, and the Properties panes on the left, where you access information on current clips, tracks, filters and transitions. The only other window is the Media Browser, which is your asset manager and automatically loads your movies, pictures and audio. So the Pictures pane will automatically list your iMovie albums and Aperture collections, as well as any other folders you drag there. Audio will automatically list your iTunes Library, GarageBand compositions and so on.

To start editing, it's simply a matter of dragging and dropping image and movie clips into the Timeline. Added content is treated as either a clip or a track. The basic distinction is that a collection of clips can reside on a single track. Tracks, however, are discrete and reside in multiple layers in the Timeline, with each track's visibility controlled by the tracks above it - just like Photoshop layers. How do you know which one you're getting? Simple: if you drag an asset onto a track, it becomes a clip on that track. Drag it below a current track, and it becomes a track in its own right. Then simply drag and drop clips and tracks around to non-destructively re-order them.

Of course, video editing is all about controlling how one asset blends into another and Norrkross Movie comes with a set of transitions in the form of Image Units provided by Apple's own Core Image framework.

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In fact, everything in Norrkross Movie is provided by Core Image, including high-quality green screening. This means a lot of the processing muscle will be handled by your Mac's graphics card, taking the load off the CPU. This also allows real-time previews without the need to continually re-render. One other advantage is that developers are starting to write Core Image Units, many of which are released free of charge, like the collection at noisefactory.com. Norrkross Movie can also make use of other people's Quartz Compositions - check out the mind-bending examples at zugakousaku.com.

Other effects such as filters, colour correction and cropping are also handled by Image Units. These latter types are applied by stringing them together into filter trees, the output of one unit becoming the input of another. It's here that the interface gets a bit fiddly; the pane for the filters and effects is quite small, making placement a little uncertain. A redesign is on the cards, however.

Similarly, it would be nice to be able to uncouple the Timeline from the main window and stretch it across a widescreen or multi-monitor configuration. One other aspect missing from the Timeline is the ability to snap one track so that its length matches that of another, although this can be set manually.

Other than that, it's remarkably intuitive. You can control a transition's duration by stretching its representation on the Timeline, and you can stretch out single images to provide logo overlays on movies. Transitions can be applied between clips on the same track or used to control transitions between adjacent tracks. Any asset or effect can also be keyframed, and its path traced out over the course of the project, although paths are not, as yet, directly editable. Finally, when you come to output and render, you'll find none of the DV-resolution constraints that iMovie imposes. Norrkross Movie is happy to output in any resolution or aspect ratio supported by QuickTime.

Norrkross Movie neatly fills a gap in the Mac video editor market, and it does so with considerable economy and style. We can't wait to see how it's going to develop.