Tenomichi 3D Edit review

The days of video-editing hardware are numbered. With CPUs and graphics cards constantly increasing in power, tying editing capabilities to proprietary adaptors is looking increasingly limited. With this in mind, UK start-up Tenomichi has developed a revolutionary new editing application called 3D Edit. It's designed around DirectX 9 Shader technology, harnessing the power of your graphics card for video-effects rendering.

The interface uses Shaders too, and is like nothing you've seen before. DirectX 9c is required for proper operation, and to make everything look better you need to turn on anti-aliasing in your graphics card drivers. Although reasonable results are possible with a card of the class of an ATi Radeon 9550, a more recent accelerator is preferable, particularly a PCI Express model. We used an AGP 8x Sapphire X800 XT with 256MB of RAM for our test, running on a dual 3.06GHz Xeon with 2GB of RAM.

The fact that the interface is entirely made of 3D objects takes some getting used to, as the application doesn't behave like Windows at all. There's no standard text-based menu bar, and no standard buttons for common functions either. If you choose to run 3D Edit in full-screen mode, it might take a while to realise that the Escape key is used to exit, rather than a menu item. There are no right mouse-button contextual menus, and the mouse wheel doesn't do anything either. There aren't even any tooltips to help you work out what the various buttons do, although the capture applet has them.

Reading the HTML-based manual closely and trying the tutorials is a must, and once you've done that things start to make more sense. The capture applet supports acquiring footage from DV and WDM devices, which includes most mainstream analog capture cards. With DV, your camcorder can be controlled, in and out points specified, and batch-capture lists set up. However, there's no scan/capture routine or automatic scene detection; the latter will be added in a free future release.

Once you've captured your footage, it's time to switch to the main 3D Edit application. A lot of activity revolves around the File dialog, which doesn't bear any resemblance to a standard Windows one. This is used both for importing clips to be edited and for adding transitions and effects. Editing with 3D Edit is reassuringly like other software, though. There's a timeline with main A and B video tracks, plus six superimposition tracks. Zooming in and out of the timeline is a simple matter of clicking on the Zoom button and moving the mouse up and down. However, when running in windowed mode, we discovered weird quirks when we maximised the application, with some elements disappearing behind others. If you want to run maximised, the full-screen option is preferable.

Your first step is to import all your media elements into the Project window, although it's also possible to drag straight to the timeline from the File dialog. Once you've imported all your clips, you can either lay them straight out on the timeline or open them in a clip monitor window and tweak the in and out points first.

Overlapping clips on the A and B tracks automatically adds a dissolve, but this can be changed to numerous alternatives. From here on in, the true power of 3D Edit comes to light. The transitions are hidden in the Meshes subdirectory, but they're pretty elaborate, and Tenomichi adds more to download on a regular basis. Some impressive 3D wipes are available, all rendered in real-time, although there's an absence of more prosaic options such as gradient wipes. The transitions are all preset as well, although Tenomichi has configurable Shader Transitions in the pipeline for a future release.