Avid VideoShop 3.0(for Mac OS Classic)

[jamie marchant]

Hi: 

 I have a copy of 'Avid VideoShop 3.0' but I can't make 'normal' videos with it, only executable movies. Anybody know anything about this software. 

-Jamie 

 

[Cory5412]

I believe this might be the software that was included with the 5400-6500 era Power Macintosh and Performa computers. I haven't used it, but I'm imagining it's meant to go with the avid cinema card for those systems' DAV slot.

It may be worth trying to find a copy of Premiere. This  was available at retail and is a little more "normal" in terms of how it operates.

 

[omidimo]

Avid had two distinct video consumer applications:

Avid Cinema, originally for 5x00/6x00 that had the Avid Cinema Card, but later a software only option that worked with the Beige G3 line.

Avid Video Shop was shipped with the TV/FM card and was quite common.

As Cory5412 has said, you are better off using Premiere or if you Mac can handle it, Final Cut Pro.

 

[jamie marchant]

Uh I see.

 

[CelGen]

There's a checkbox you NEED to select when exporting the finished project or else it packages it as an executable.

Be aware that pretty much all the compressors it gives you are obsolete these days and online sites like Youtube will reject the file if you try and use them. My suggestion is export as an uncompressed video (If I recall it only exports as Quicktime MOV but while it's been a while I THINK it will also do AVI) and either upload that directly or run that through a compression utility on a modern computer because the raw file is going to be enormous.

Videoshop and Cinema are from the era when it was assumed you were either using it to generate EDL's to export the finished project back to tape (Videoshop at least supports VISCA devices) or you you were making small thumbnail sized videos (320x240 or smaller and only a few seconds long).

 

[Cory5412]

Would "exporting EDLs"  have applied to a home usage scenario? Avid videoshop and cinema are home use applications from the late '90s. I'm guessing the presumption is you were either capturing with a spigot or you had something like a 630 or 6200-6500. (VideoShop 3 in particular seems to be from pretty early in the '90s.)

Premiere and Avid's higher end products would of course have supported those options, although Avid is also associated with being an appliance into which you insert a 6-slot II or a 9-series Quadra or Power Mac. I'm guessing it was at that level that compatibility with VISCA applied.

I know that Premiere 3 (~1993-1994) had an option, with serial control of a deck (LANC or plain RS232, perhaps a few other protocols) to capture video in increments of a few seconds, rewind the deck and make another pass at it, allowing for a very slow and probably ultimately not good for the deck capture of tape. In a lot of ways, the actual limit was your imagination and how much space you could get for video.

 

[jamie marchant]

Hmm I'll look for that checkbox, thank you. I don't really care that's an old codec, I'm just doing this cause I cam across a copy and wanted to see what old Mac video editing software was like. 

 

[IPalindromeI]

System 7 Today also recommends QuickFLIX.

 

[CelGen]

Would "exporting EDLs"  have applied to a home usage scenario?

Heck if I know. When I got my copy free with the Apple TV/Video system it always struck me as odd that such a really powerful piece of editing software (it is actually really good compared to some of the suites bundled with say the VideoVision or VideoSpigot, plus the CD includes additional documentation and a full PDF copy of the manual) was pretty much being bundled with a (mediocre) capture card.

 

[omidimo]

Strata bought VideoShip from Avid, and released one more major version before it was put out to pasture. The original bundle version was a great intro to the world of video for most consumers, a pre-iMovie if you will.

 

[Unknown_K]

I have a few versions of the AVID Videoshop and the Strata version as well. They were interesting programs but most high end capture boards came with their own software (Radius, Media100, AVID) and low end ones bundled Premiere so there wasn't much of a market for others.

Originally EDL's were used so people could make a final product using multiple video recorders to copy sections as needed way before the video was digitized to disk in any form. So I can see video enthusiasts using crude captures (and lets be honest the AVID Cinema hardware was barely a step up from the crap Apple installed in their AV systems) to make a final video and then using their master tapes to splice it together. Mostly it was to get people hooked into the workflow so they would graduate to a real AVID system. This was way back when video editing was pretty expensive and the cheap solutions had problems just syncing audio with the video after a few minutes (that is if you didn't start dropping frames and had to start over).