It’s a boom time for Mac nonlinear video-editing apps. In the under-$800 realm alone, there’s Radius EditDV for Firewire enthusiasts, the imminent Adobe Premiere upgrade, and the newly revamped Strata VideoShop 4.0/3D (formerly owned by Avid).
Lacking the Firewire power of EditDV or the semipro feel of Premiere, VideoShop aims to impress with flashy features that you don’t see elsewhere. These include a QuickDraw 3D compositing track (hence the 3D after the program’s version number) and the ability to generate royalty-free musical soundtracks automatically.
VideoShop 4.0/3D supports little-known QuickTime tricks — specifically, the ability to add tracks containing 3DMF QuickDraw 3D objects, and motions for those objects. For example, you can import a spinning cube and map a video clip onto it — something no other digital-video program any- where near this price range can do. Note, however, that VideoShop itself doesn’t create 3D objects or motions — Strata wants you to do that in StudioPro, the company’s 3D animation program — and mapping control is fairly limited. You can’t map a different video track onto each face of the cube, as you can with a high-end digital-video system, or even adjust the mapping position, as you can with a true 3D program such as StudioPro.
VideoShop now incorporates TuneBuilder, a movie-scoring tool formerly available as a stand-alone product. To use TuneBuilder, select a TuneBuilder-enabled song from the included disc (you can purchase a variety of additional songs from a library licensed by Airworks, 800-525- 5962) and specify the duration you need. You can generate as many versions as you want, each of which will be the proper length and have a musically coherent opening, body, and ending. Finished clips are saved as AIFFs and can be imported into a VideoShop audio track. The whole process is nearly effortless, but there are two catches: you’re limited to the TuneBuilder song library, which is very business-oriented (and rather bland); and scoring this way gives you a generic “bed” of sound, not a real score that follows the action of the video. Still, a TuneBuilder score is better than steahng something off a CD, or worse, having no music at all.
More important than these high-visibility features are VideoShop’s basic editing tools. The program adeptly assembles bread-and-butter, cuts-only movies. You get unhmited audio and video tracks, the ability to drag and drop media from the Bin (where you store imported clips) to the Project window, and VideoShop ’s time-line. Stretch and trim tools let you fine-edit individual clips. And you get real-time previews, something Premiere users have been pining for since version 1.
VideoShop also offers better special-effects tools and filters than Premiere does (Adobe deliberately shortchanges these areas of Premiere so folks will buy After Effects). VideoShop ought to serve anyone whose special-effects needs aren’t too rigorous. For example, in the Canvas window, which looks like a simplified After Effects Comp window, you can layer multiple tracfe, move clips along keyframed paths, add scrolling tides, and do simple dynamic mesh warp and morphing effects. You can also apply dynamic filters to a range of frames within a clip; to do that in Premiere, you have to break the clip into two or more pieces first. Unfortunately, VideoShop’s own filter plug-in API is not compatible with third-party Premiere or After Effects filters (although it does support Photoshop filters). Nor does it import Photoshop images with layers or alpha channels intact, or, for that matter, generate alpha channels on its own (essential for sophisticated compositing).
Strata VideoShop 4.0/3D may not boast the power (nor the $1200-plus combined street price) of Premiere and After Effects, but not everyone needs that much. As the Mac’s only all-in-one editing, special-effects, and music-scoring studio, VideoShop is a real steal.
Anzovin, Steven. (May 1998). VideoShop 4.0/3D. MacAddict. (pgs. 48-49).
Strata Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (1 vote)
20 / 
2015-08-10 / 
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Video_Shop4.03D.img_.bin
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
