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The capabilities of the digital cameras of today also include the making of videos, most of them recording the files on microSD or SD Cards or Memory Stick Duo cards of high storage volume – the latest trends tend to aim 8GB and even 16 GB – but why the large storage capacity you may ask: well, most of the cameras record the movie in the MPEG format (not so many in the DivX format) that requires plenty of space, especially if you wish to create lengthy movies.

In order to keep the quality at a very high level but also to compress the movie files so that they wouldn’t occupy a lot of your hard drive when you transfer them to your computer, you need a professional software that does the “shrinking” of such files in a very smart way – so that the quality is not lost or at least the image is not distinguishable from the original file and the video file gets smaller. You might also find/get videos from the Internet which would require some editing or re-encoding – either way a good tool is needed.

DivX Author is a relatively new piece of software as it just reached the 1.5 version. Although young, the video encoder comes with a very mature, sleek and professional interface to meet the demands of users who wish to work on a stylish interface that blends in also with Windows Vista’s Aero interface. But this video processing tool does not only look good – it also works very well – especially at the level of detail in the videos.

Like I mentioned above, any video recorded with a digital camera or obtained from other sources like the Internet can be optimized with DivX Author. What’s even more practical and interesting is that the software can be used by amateurs (newbies) but also by professionals in the video editing business. As you can see in the screenshots below, you can tweak, configure and select the desired settings for the video you wish to encode: you have general profiles but you also have the advanced settings module.

Even if you don’t know how the video will look in the end, you have a preview section where you get to see clearly how it will look like at the end of the processing. DivX Author addresses mainly to the enhanced DivX videos that are quite similar to a DVD – if played on a DivX Ultra certified device (the new HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players with the capability to play DivX videos) – they can have subtitles and will display a menu and also will let you choose some settings: in the menu panel of DivX Author you can customize a template ready-made menu or you can create your own from scratch.

This concept of a single DivX file that would feature all these wonderful attributes which are similar to DVDs is quite revolutionary and needs to encouraged: the quality of a DivX file on a high-volume storage space like 4.5 GB DVD is at least 5 times better than the video image provided by a standard DVD movie: you can compress a DVD movie into a CD size DivX file that would look just as good – just imagine the quality of a DVD size DivX file.

One thing is for certain: you also need a computer with a very good CPU so that the video processing tasks would take a lot less time and would also be encoded in a more professional way. Any dual-core with 2GHz frequency power is recommended. The supported formats for video files are: DivX, AVI, DV/HDV, DVD-Video, DVD-VR, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, QuickTime and Windows Media Video. You can use any soundtrack in the following formats: MPEG-1 Layer 2, MPEG-1 Layer 3 (MP3s), Dolby Digital, Wave Linear PCM, AIFF, and Windows Media Audio. In the picture Slideshow you can insert pictures that come as BMP, PNG, JPG, WMF, EMF and PSD files.

Applicability:
DivX Author is an extremely good choice when it comes to both occasional videos (shot with the personal digital camera) or other videos that you consider very important and need to be at a very high quality and also to require decent storage space. And not only that, you can combine and edit multiple videos into a single DivX Video: you can get various video files, with different frame rates and resolutions and put them into one DivX file. You can Also create photo slideshows set to music: you take large collections of pictures and turn them into wonderful presentations with your favorite soundtrack by using the versatile collection of templates and the very-easy-to-use tools. You can find a video tutorial on how to use it here.

Pro(s): You can tell this piece of software has been properly built just by looking at the design and after analyzing a few of its functions. It performs great and it does offer more possibilities than the usual user would expect. The price is also fair – because if you’re in the video editing business it’s easy to pay $39 for it – it’s like you almost get for free – because you can get back the money by selling various projects you create with this tool. Very clever!

Con(s): The banner that can be seen in the output panel is a bit annoying and also the interface might be tricky for users with computer screens working at the 1024x768 resolution, as the application interface cannot be shrunk by window resize (the above screenshots are in full size) due to the interface modules, but it can be increased though if you have a high resolution computer screen.

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Price: $39

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