Norrkross Movie...Yes, there are other video editing apps...

Posted May 21st, 2008 by Keene Haywood

Mention digital video editing and a few applications immediately come to mind: iMovie, Final Cut Pro on the Mac, Premiere and Vegas on the PC and of course the venerable Avid systems. All are powerful in their own way. From simple editing to sophisticated graphics and animations, these apps and associated plug-ins have you covered. But, they have a learning curve that varies from relatively flat (iMovie prior to 08) to fairly steep (advanced editing in Final Cut Pro and Avid). Green screening, text editing/animation and compositing can quickly become large time suckers and require digging into PDF manuals or their printed brethren. And things don't get any easier if you start diving into After Effects, Shake or Motion for compositing and special effects... Well, there is an option if you are interested in doing some fairly sophisticated editing without a huge investment of time or steep learning curves. The option is Norrkross Movie. Its a slick video editing application that uses nodal filters and special effects techniques, very simple drag and drop, a nice green screen feature and much more. Its not free and is Mac only but at $59 its worth a look if you want to spice up your video editing, try something different or add some depth to your projects. The developer has some nice screencasts and a good help section to walk you through its main features. If you want to wade into some new waters outside of the traditional video editing apps, give Norrkross Movie a whirl. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Note: For those of you who have thrown up your arms in frustration at Apple's iMovie 08 and the (apparently) new programming crew that decided to throw out the tried and true timeline and do something completely different, you really might breathe a sigh of fresh air at Norkross Movie. Also, you might find the developer's Norrkross MorphX worth a look for a nice image morphing application.

Keene Haywood (University of Texas@Austin - DIIA)