iSquint is an iPod video conversion kit, a very good one to say the least. It’s built for Mac OS and runs at super sharp speeds. iSquint works with all popular video formats.
Converting is simple, drag and drop and you’re on your way to hugging your iPod. You can also convert to TV size and set the quality of the video. We [iApp] personally recommend using High or go Nuts. An extra feature is the ability to add to iTunes when it has finished converting.

See it for your self, it’s free and available now.
(v1.5.2 - 5.7MB -
03/06/08 Mac OS X
10.3.9 or
later)

Rating: 3/5

Librarian Pro is like a more professional (and possibly better layed out) version of Delicious Library. Librarian Pro allows you to catalogue all of your books, movies, music, hardware, software and video games in one database. This means you can loan out books and track when they are due back, great for those pesky friends who keep everything a bit too long!?Ǭ†If you’ve used Delicious Library, Bruji, iTunes or a text file you can import the items stored into Librarian Pro. It can even detect software on your Mac and catalogue that for you too. Importing is reasonably seamless, although I got one small error whilst importing from Delicious Library. Sadly, many people will still like Delicious Library above Librarian Pro because of the issues with adding items. Instead of being able to scan items with your iSight, you have to enter each item individually. Although for those of you who would prefer to have more options over ease of adding items Librarian Pro is great. If you’d like to show the world your library you can easily export to HTML, although this feature needs polishing to make perfect. The interface to is very polished and everything is in the logical position, meaning it isn’t hard to browse through your collection.?Ǭ†Overall Librarian Pro seems a more professional version of Delicious Library, but it’s still lacking vital features which make Delicious Library. My advice, wait till version 2 for Delicious Library in a Librarian Pro interface.

Price: $29.95

Website:?Ǭ†http://www.koingosw.com/products/librarianpro.php

Rating: 4.5/5

iShowU is an application for capturing your screen. From recording high production screencasts to showing off your mac to other, iShowU is an amazing app for any recording task. It comes in handy so often that you want to show someone whats happening on your screen, and screenshots aren’t enough. iShowU not only records video, but it can record your voice, and even the system audio. You can also pause and resume your recordings. There are also a good selection of recording profiles, which include the scaling, the frame-rates, quality, and format. It can also follow your mouse, keeping your mouse in the centre of the action the whole time.

Demo:

Price: ?Ǭ†$20

Site:?Ǭ†http://www.shinywhitebox.com/home/home.html

Snapz Pro X has finally gone Universal. Snapz Pro X is the premier video screen capturing application. It allows you to record what’s going on in any part of your screen. The new version is also Leopard compatible and includes a few bug fixes and some enhancements.

You can find out more about Snapz Pro X 2.1.0 at http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/.

This is the last release under the name of “Democracy Player”, soon to be Mira. Included in this mature beta are several new features. Among them, auto-updating (using Sparkle), “folder watching”, resume playback, better proxy support, improved performance, and more. Folder watching is a feature that automatically adds videos located in a specified folder to your collection. For more, go here.

Rating: 3.5/5

General Info: One app that’s always fascinated me is Apple’s iMovie. PulpMotion is very nice companion to iMovie. PulpMotion is a lot like iMovie in the sense that it’s for making a movie from videos and/or photos. PulpMotion even feels like a x.0 iLife app. Sadly, that also applies to PulpMotion’s stability. PulpMotion suffers from some odd bugs that placed the window half out of the screen and one crash. Like any iLife app PulpMotion has amazing output. To get an idea of PulpMotion’s output, let me describe some of it’s themes. One is a spinning, globular maelstrom of pictures and/or video of your choice. Another is a horizontally sliding pattern or color with pictures and/or video falling on top of it. The themes number many more, so there’s bound to be something you like. What you can add to these themes includes not just music, video, and photos, but also live or recorded video from iSight. A feature iLife should steal borrow is the ability to export, or “Share” as Apple calls it, application files. Exported applications feature some neat interactive abilities like using the iSight video feed on the viewer’s Mac (much to your friend’s paranoid surprise).

What PulpMotion needs to learn from iLife are more interface guidelines. One, the media browsing bar is labeled “Medias”. Two, there’re are too many side and top-bars at a time. This is very confusing on the first launch, even with the sticky-note instructions. The area labeled “Outputs” doesn’t seem necessary until at least something is actually output. “Compositions” seems to be the equivalent of timeline in iMovie; it seems logical that “Compositions” would be located at the bottom. The theme browser at the top of the window is shown by default and adds to the clutter. To hide these crowding interface areas PulpMotion relies on the menubar. Like GarageBand, it would be wise to keep most areas of the interface features hidden until they’re needed. PulpMotion features something iLife apps should really use: an easy way for third parties to make their own themes. With an interface refresh and speed improvements PulpMotion would be an iLife app of it’s own. As it stands now, PulpMotion is still a useful tool any iMovie enthusiast should try out.

Retail Price: $29.95

Site: http://www.pulpmotion.com/

Screenshot

?Ǭ†Theocacao has been allowed to leak some of the features of Delicious Library 2.0, to be released in October. Among them are: advanced ways to export libraries to the web, full iTunes integration, and (of course) an amazing new interface that takes full advantage of Leopard’s capabilities. Cryptically, Theocacao also reports “…you’ve probably noticed there are no screenshots. There’s a reason for that.”

Rating: 4.5/5

General Info: To learn what VisualHub does one can dissect the name. Visual-Hub. OK, so you still can’t guess. VisualHub is a video conversion app that can convert just about anything you would need to. It uses the reasonably fast back-end FFmpeg to convert video at a speedier pace than QuickTime Pro. It converts video in about real-time on a new Mac. You don’t have to know that an iPod with video can handle 640 by 480 resolution video at 30 frames per second to use this app. VisualHub has presets that can convert video to formats supported by ?ج£¬øtv, iPod 5G, North American and non-North American TV, PSP, Final Cut, DVD, Wii, various web formats, and a whole lot more than you’ll ever need.
In addition to all of those presets, you can change all of the usual advanced options like crop, deinterlace, resolution, frame rate, bitrate, codecs, and (you guessed it) a lot more. Very convenient and timesaving is the fact that you can save these settings as a file to make your own presets. Another timesaving aspect is preview and “video info”. Preview alone can do a lot to prevent you from using the wrong settings, saving re-encoding time. The best thing about VisualHub is it’s price. QuickTime Pro costs $29.99 at first. The problem Apple QuickTime Pro has is, besides it’s slowness, that you can lose your license with an upgrade to the next major version. Also, that license losing upgrade is essentially forced as new iTunes music and video often requires QuickTIme to be at it’s latest version. Next contenders, Roxio’s Popcorn and Crunch, $49.99 and $39.99. VisualHub’s price is $23.32. FFmpeg X is free and hard to install, and doesn’t work too well.
The only problems I have with VisualHub are with it’s interface. On the top left of the main window is a box showing “VisualHub” and more info about the app. Why? It simply wastes space on a product you paid for. Second, the “To:” label designating the sections of presets is discolored and has it’s own background. Lastly, is the reliance on ugly, separated palettes. Apps like VoodooPad at least give you the option of having them in a “drawer”. Ok, so those are small points, but they’re irritating and seem easily fixable.
Who would need VisualHub? Anyone who needs to convert video to anything other than iPod formats, iSquint and iTunes are free solutions for iPod. VisualHub looks to be the best consumer level app for converting video.

Retail Price:?Ǭ† $23.32

Site: http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/

MacRumors just posted that according to several sources, Final Cut Studio 2 is now shipping. Apple previewed Final Cut Studio 2 at NAB in April. Final Cut Studio 2 includes Apples new color app, coincidentally called Color….

I can’t wait to get my hands on Final Cut Studio 2, and I will make sure to post my first looks once I get a chance to see it.

Big Mug Software is looking for some beta testers to test its application called Capture Magic. Capture Magic records directly from a DV camera straight to the computer hard disk drive and also allows you to maximize the quality of your captured picture. I am sure Capture Magic will be on the dock of every mac video editors computer. It replaces $1000s of dollars worth of hardware with software based Waveform Monitor, Vectrorscope and others used to ensure maximum video quality. You also do not need to worry about faulty tapes and recording devices by recording live to your computer using Capture Magic.

Here are some of the wonderful features that Capture Magic includes:

- Record/Monitor from multiple DV cameras at the same time
- Record directly from camera to disk
- Preview monitor with guides
- Weighted Waveform Monitor
- Colored Waveform Monitor
- RGB Parade
- Weighted Vectorscope
- Colored Vectorscope
- Luminance Histogram
- RGB Histogram
- Analyze pre-recorded DV files
- Pause input for accurate analysis

If you are interested in participating in the beta, then please email beta@bigmugsoftware.com

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