More New features
So in addition to everything that Pinnacle Liquid had going for it - one of the best programs at editing native HDV MPEG files, a lot of features for media management normally only found in high end programs such as Avid's own Xpress Pro, multicamera editing, lots of realtime, high quality effects, as well as DVD writing written into the program itself - what new stuff is added in version 7? Windows Media 9 Editing Now you can place windows Media files on the timeline and edit these without have to render the basic clips first. When exporting you can also export the audio 5.1 surround sound to Windows Media. Support for muxed files In version 6 whenever any audio file was loaded into AL it would insist on splitting it into left and right channels and storing it in the media folder, this would take time and extra space on your hard drive. Now with version 7 you can load stereo wav files and they are available immediately! Hooray. The same is true for video clips with audio in the one file - nearly every program captures footage with the video and audio in one file, so it means you can now easily and quickly load clips created with other programs. Some compressed formats of audio still need to be split on import but on the whole this is a huge improvement. SmartSound Support AL now ships with SmartSound - the simple music creation tool. This has been available to Studio users for some time but now is also in Avid Liquid. The library of music available in AL is more comprehensive than Studio, and obviously you can augment it with other CDs of music from SmartSound. Its also pretty easy to use - you choose "Add SmartSound" and it opens a dialogue box which lets you choose the style, type and temp, as well as the duration. Click a button and the music track is created. You can re-edit it at any time. SmartSound is never going to produce an Oscar winning sound track, but is great for simple bits of copyright free music for your video - we actually use it at DVC for the 6 second links between each section of our tutorials for example because it saves a huge amount of time in going through banks of CDs trying to find suitable tracks. New Commotion filters Avid have added a large number of filters which used to ship with Commotion, a compositing application owned by Pinnacle. These include some filters which are different variations on effects that are already available in the program such as brightness and contrast and levels, and includes some other, extremely useful filters - especially to do with keying. The Miracle Alpha cleaner is included for removing "holes" in mattes, various matter chokers and matte feather filters are also supplied. We also have some particle filters such as fractal clouds and fractal fire. A lot of these filters are high quality and quite complex. So, for example, although they will all attempt to playback in realtime most do not manage it. You can get a reasonable preview of some of them but will have to render them to see the full effect. However, they do add significantly to the power of the filters inside Avid Liquid. This is the full list of filters: - Blurs and Sharpen: Blur, Channel Blur, Edge Blur EZ, Edge Blur, Motion Blur, Radial Blur, Sharpen, Super Blur, Unsharpen Mask.
- Channel: Shift Channels
- Color Correct: Color Balance HLS, Color Balance RGB, Color Map, Replace Color, Tint.
- Distort: Corner Pin, Hall of Mirrors, Mirage, Turbulence, Turbulence EZ, Turbulent Edges.
- Image Control: Brightness and Contrast, Invert, Levels, Posterize, Threshold.
- Keying: BlueScreen Key, Color Key, GreenScreen Key, LumiKey, Smooth Screen, Spill Killer, Spill Killer EZ.
- Matte: Edge Finder, Edge Finder EZ, Matte Feather, Matte Feather EZ, Matte Feather Sharp.
- Noise: Channel Noise, Median, MinMax, Noise
- Particles : Fractal Clouds, Fractal Fire, Fractal Tunnel
- Stylize : Alpha Ramp, Drop Shadow, Emboss, Framer, Grunge, Mosaic, Real Shadows, Video Feedback.
- Video: Broadcast Safe Colors, Field Blend, Field Swap
Realtime Timewarp At last - realtime slow motion inside Liquid. This only currently applies to the fixed rate slow motion - if you want to vary the speed of the clip, starting at 50%, dropping to 0% then up to 100% using the Dynamic timewarp then you will still have to render. The realtime timewarp lets you use all of the options available - like motion detection, trails etc. How well it performs does depend on your PC. We have found it to be good with DV, but it struggles with HDV. New Realtime Filters Some other new realtime filters are also included - DreamGlow, Soften, DuoChrome, Lighting, RGB Color Balance and White Balance. Avid have also added a realtime Image stabilization plug-in - although it has to be said we have had variable results with this. HD output through the MovieBox Pro One area that Liquid lacked, like lots of programs, was when editing HD it was not possible to see the full HD picture on a proper video monitor. This is very important for things like colour correction which really need to be seen on a video monitor to judge correctly. With Liquid 7 you still cannot see the HD picture on an HD video monitor but you can see it at standard definition out through the Avid MovieBox Pro. So now you can at least see the picture on a proper video monitor to judge colour correction, even if it is not at full video quality. Second screen output With version 6 you could see your video image (either HD or SD) full screen on your main monitor during playback. This was very useful for seeing an HD picture at full quality on your own PC screen - many of which would be high enough resolution to for playback of an HD picture. With version 7 Avid have introduced a feature to playback this full screen picture on your second screen while editing - so one would have the program and all your controls and the second would have the full screen playback. At present this does not work on every combination of monitors and graphic cards we have tried - it works better with ATI cards, for example, than with nVidia - se we can't promise that it will work on your system. New screen layout There is a new view - now you can replace the source monitor with a proper project window - which, unlike the mini project browser, allows you to see the media tab as well as all the other tabs. This is very useful for laptop users who can now see all the important windows at once rather than having to switch views to see the project window. New timecode window A little pop up window, which is also movable, which shows the timecode of source or destination. Low res/high res screen Avid engineers have improved the quality of the on screen display compared to previous versions. This has had a knock on effect to limiting the realtime performance a bit since everything is displayed on screen in higher resolution. However at the same time they have also introduced a low res mode. If you activate this the picture is fuzzier - approx a quarter of the proper resolution - but you can get more layers of realtime effects. On a very simple test project I was able to get 12 layers of simple picture in picture effect rather than about 7 with the high resolution display active. This is on a fairly high spec system - a 3.4Ghz Pentium 4 with 2GB RAM and a decent graphic card. New export dialogue & redesigned interface One of the major changes in version 6 was to give us a simpler interface with drop down menus. Avid have taken this further and redesigned the export dialogue box. Gone are the save sequence as command and in its place an export to file dialogue box which allows you to choose lots more formats including DV AVI file (although the standard fuse still exists) as well as various windows media formats, including HD, DivX and various MPEG formats, including HD variations. Some formats will need the codec from the original manufacturers although it is our understanding that DivX will now be bundled. Ezcapture A new, simpler capture program has been introduced. The logging tool is still there but this new module does give you some things the logging tool does not. Firstly the ability to capture from DV directly into MPEG, but you can also capture into other formats as well - MPEG1, MPEG2, DivX and MJPEG are all supported. EzCapture also gives you the ability to capture to a specific file name in a location you choose - with the logging tool it captures into its own media directory and organises and names the clips how it likes. |
An example of a Pinnacle Wizard - there are also specific functions to import Studio projects as well as a wizard that will search through your computer looking for any usable media and making that ready to import.
Take several clips, sync them based on the in or out point, timecode or first maker, and then drag the synced clip to the source window. You can play them here and simply hit a button to choose to which camera you want to switch. Then drag the clip from the source window onto the timeline with your cuts made, ready to be tweaked. You see the 4 camera (or 9 or 16 camera) view on your TV attached to the Pro breakout box. Once on the timeline you can gang both the source and destination views together and as you scrub the timeline you see the final image in full on the destination viewer and the four sources all scrubbing at once.
New audio features including VST plug-in support - opening up the program to the addition of lots of new plug-in filters that are available, many free, plus ASIO sound card support and 5.1 surround sound mixing. The sound has been re-vamped considerably and is now getting close to Premiere Pro functionality with different buses and keyframable panning of your surround sound effects. The biggest difference is that LE will not edit down to the sample level, but in many other ways I have found the sound mixing to be slightly easier than Premiere Pro. Edition will also timewarp the sound (between 50% and 200%) as well picture in version 6. 
Bezier interpolation on keyframes for filters - the keyframe window has changed a lot from previous versions and the Bezier keyframing means much better control over how your effects move.