Digital Home Thoughts: Digital Juice Wedding Editor's Toolkit

Motion Design Elements
Motion design elements (also known as MDEs) are, in essence, clip-art, but that is almost doing them a disservice. For unlike traditional clip-art that is flat and static, these are animated sequences. The inclusion of alpha channels means that you can easily place these elements over your video or, as a video demo on the DJ site shows, you can combine the elements with other parts to create your own unique backgrounds.

MDEs are possibly the hardest part of the toolkit to use effectively, primarily because they require more thought about how best to use them if you don't want the end result to look cheesy :oops:.

I've put together a short clip that demonstrates some of the MDEs included in the toolkit. I've provided two versions - clicking on the screenshot will launch a QuickTime movie of the same dimensions, i.e. 320x240. I've also included a version that is the same resolution as PAL DV, i.e. 720x576. The movie file is much larger (159MB) but it does show the elements at their best resolution. Any artefacts in the QT movie are a result of the compression settings used.


Figure 15: Motion Design Elements in action. Click on the image to play the QuickTime movie (44.4MB).

Fonts
The fonts included in the toolkit are TrueType fonts for both PC and Macintosh. As such, they scale beautifully to best meet your needs. Figure 15 gives a small example of each of the fonts supplied. Installation of the fonts is through the normal process for each operating system and, once installed, you just use them as normal.


Figure 16: The fonts.

WETK in Action
All of the examples included in this review have been made with my own fair hand, Premiere Pro and a Matrox RT-100 editing system. The video clips were taken on a Sony camcorder at my brother's wedding.

Once you get past the learning curve of understanding just what it is that the DVDs contain, how to drive the Juicer and what makes up a Jump Set, it really is very easy indeed to start adding content from the toolkit into your videos. In the main, once you've found the settings in Juicer that work best for your editing configuration, you'll stick to those and the Juicer software makes it easy for you to define the default settings for the different types of content that DJ deliver.

If you would like to see reduced-size animated versions of the content from the toolkit, Digital Juice have got a gallery on their Website.

Conclusions
The cost of the toolkit is possibly something that some potential purchasers will initially blanch at. However, when you remember how much content you are getting, the quality of that content and how easily it is going to be to incorporate it into your productions, I do think it is value for money. Not just that, but if you are serious about wedding videos, you'll soon make that money back and then some. 8)

If there is one thing that the toolkit is lacking, though, it is some royalty-free music. It would be the finishing touch to what is otherwise a superb product and one that exudes professionalism.