Digital Home Thoughts: Digital Juice Wedding Editor's Toolkit

Money, Money and Yet more Money
According to a recent American Wedding Study by Bridal Infobank, the last ten years have seen spending on an average wedding grow by 50% to an average of $22,360. This trend is repeated in other countries - UK weddings cost a similar amount of money.

According to the President of the Association for Wedding Professionals International, 6% of the $65 billion spent on weddings each year will be for video, equating to $390 million. Average prices seem to be around $2,500, growing to perhaps double that, depending on the equipment and personnel used, and the content and time taken to create the final result.

Faced with that sort of charge, you are going to expect high quality product. If you are the person providing the service, how do you ensure that you deliver that product in a market where you might expect to spend up to 40 hours a wedding video and still want to make a reasonable annual income?

Enter the Wedding Editor's Toolkit
The Wedding Editor's Toolkit from Digital Juice is a good starting point. Shipping on 10 DVDs, plus the Juicer software on CD-ROM, you get:

• 50 animated wipes;
  
• 22 animated backgrounds;
  
• 20 animated jump sets;
  
• 100 motion design elements;
  
• 25 fonts.

That's a lot of content and when I first received the package, my thought was "how on earth am I going to be able to choose what I want to use?". Enter the Juicer ...

Juice That Content!
The Juicer is processing software, supplied free with all Digital Juice products, that runs on both Windows and Macintosh systems. It acts as a product browser, allowing you to access thumbnails and information about the DJ products you've got. Once you select an item, Juicer then previews the item so that you can see the animation in action. It also allows you to perform keyword searches to help find content of interest.

This feature is very useful because of the wide range of keywords used. Not only can you look for colour words, e.g. blue, but also content words like balloons and bands. The last example is particularly indicative of how much attention Digital Juice pay to how their customers might use their products - the keyword list includes both "band" and "bands". If you search for "band", you will find two clips, each containing a single ring. If you search for "bands", you get - you guessed it - clips containing two rings. It may be a small point but it is a detail point and this product shows time and time again how DJ pays attention to the details.


Figure 1: Juicer 2 showing product browser and preview window.

Once you've selected the content of interest, you place it in the render queue - the busy part of Juicer where it converts the clips to almost any codec on your system, ready for use with your video editing product.


Figure 2: Render settings in Juicer 2.

In the rendering process, the tool can output both NTSC and PAL DV sized video with selectable field priority, frames per second and speed of animation. You can specify how long you want the clip to be and, if you've selected a length that is shorter than the original, Juicer can create cross-dissolve frames at the end so that the clip can be used as a loop.

That last point is an area where the Juicer really helps to extend the usefulness of the toolkit. You aren't just getting a bunch of DVDs with some video clips that you drop into your productions. The Juicer helps you to create unique content by virtue of allowing you to change the output parameters, not only to suit your needs, but also to help make this production slightly different from any previous production, or from any production made by someone else using the toolkit.

Where Juicer could do with additional flexibility, though, is the speed of the animation. At the moment, it is limited to a few choices from a menu - very slow, slow, normal, fast and very fast. Juicer interpolates the frames it has according to the speed you've selected. Unfortunately, if you want to alter the duration of the clip and you want it to remain loopable, you need to select the cross dissolve option. It would be better if you could enter the desired duration and Juicer automatically adjusts the frame interpolation to meet your needs.


Figure 3: Manipulating the output.

Another example of how the Juicer works to extend the versatility of the content shipped on the DVDs, it can colourise the animation to meet your needs and also flip and rotate the output.

Changing the colour of the content is a fantastic way to extend the lifespan of the toolkit as you can easily adapt the content to match your production, as you'll see in some of the examples later on in this review. There are, however, two drawbacks to this feature, in my opinion:

• The Juicer needs an eye-dropper that allows you to pick any colour on the screen. This would make it easier to match against a video clip.
  
  
• The colourise option should default to the current colour of the content. This would make it easier to make small adjustments to the colour, for example if you want to take a gold clip and tone it down slightly.

Figure 4: Juicer output choices.

Let's take a closer look at the content delivered on the toolkit.