The Hindu : National : A package to create your own movies

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Sunday, Oct 08, 2006
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A package to create your own movies

Anand Parthasarathy

Pinnacle launches a made-for-India product at an affordable cost

AMATEUR WORK AT HOME: Ideal for those who own a camcorder.

Bangalore: If you dreamed of unleashing your creative talents and making a small movie on your own (if you could afford to do it!) — your time may have come. Pinnacle is a California-based company that belongs to the same group as Avid — makers of the most widely used professional tool for digital film editing. They have just put together specially for the Indian market, a neat package of hardware and software that will allow the rest of us amateurs and dummies to create our own movies, doing most of the things the studio guys do — albeit in a scaled-down fashion.

Handy form factor

The Hindu was enabled to evaluate ``Pinnacle To Go'' which has just been launched in India. The hardware in the package consists of a small device, only slightly larger than a mouse, that plugs into the Universal Serial Bus or USB port that all the PCs offer today. Within this handy form factor, the makers have crammed a TV tuner — which converts your PC into a television receiver — and a video capture device that can `grab' video footage or still pictures from the PC, digital still or movie camera or a VCR/DVD player.

That means if you see interesting visuals on TV — or even a full serial — you can use Pinnacle To Go and keep a digital copy which can be edited or manipulated later. Almost all the standard formats for such imports are enabled. Recording from TV is done in the latest MPEG-4 format. The software CD that comes with the package, includes Pinnacle's MediaCenter — which facilitates all this capture — as well as ``QuickStart,'' the editing tool that allows the user to edit footage into a film, adding titles and some basic ``FX'' — the jargon the `pros' use to denote the special effects they put in. The end product transfers quite easily to a file in the DivX or MPEG-2 format if you want to save it on the PC — or burn a DVD as a `take away.'

Viewing on an iPod

Interestingly, you can also save the product for viewing on an iPod or a Sony PlayStation. A TV-type remote makes most interactions with the PC easy.

The package costs just under Rs. 5,000 and considering that a TV tuner card that converts the PC monitor into a TV screen costs nearly Rs. 3,000 if bought separately, it is good value for those who own a camcorder, regularly shoot `home movies' and want to create their own cinematic products with a touch of the professional.

And who knows, this might just be the beginning of a beautiful friendship — between you and your camera.

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