Continue reading »]]> The Mac has long been the homestead for effective and easy video editing, graphic design, and video compressing for many professionals and novices alike. Maybe you want to throw together a few video clips. Maybe you have more time and want to fine-tune every edit. Or maybe you just want to flip through clips the way you flip through album covers in iTunes. To accomplish these tasks, you don’t really need invest on professional video editors like Final Cut Pro and Avid Studio. If you are at all interested in getting your creative juices flowing, video wise, iMovie works fine for novices. If, however, iMovie can’t import or handle your video in the way you want, there are lots of other smaller and still great apps available. Want to get your hands on some decent iMovie alternatives for satisfying all your video editing needs? Well, we’ve come up Top 5 iMovie alternatives that will take care of your tweaking requirements on Mac.

1. Media Magician for Mac

Media Magician for Mac is a user-friendly package for AVCHD transferring, compressing and entry-level video editing. It’s very handy to back up AVCHD (and other HD video recordings) to Mac HDD and export their own short film with just some simple editing, which is quite intuitive- any video from the media library can be dragged and dropped to the timeline where you cut video by frame-accurate, trash undesired frames, join multiple AVCHD clips together, set video effect including 3D Red-Blue/Red-Cyan effect, mute (or articulate) audio, rotate video, take snapshot, etc.

What set Media Magician apart from other video editing software is its massive import and export formats. Comparing with iMovie, this app accepts much more formats: MP4, MOV, M4V, AVI, MKV, MTS, M2TS, TOD, MOD, MOV, MXF, VOB, ect. Any video can be thrown in it for editing. In terms of export format, it’s also impressive, there are Lossless M2TS/MKV output is intended for seamless merge of multiple AVCHD clips; under Editor tab there are intermediate codecs such as Apple Intermediate codec, ProRes 422, Avid DNxHD so that professionals can further edit their artwork natively in Final Cut Pro, Avid, Adobe AE, etc; the Online tab offers a time-saving way for users to upload their work to YouTube; also there’s a Device tab under which you can find hundreds of presets for almost all the devices that play video, from tablets and smartphones to HD media players and video game console. This really makes sense for average users who has no idea what codecs are or what format to use- just find your device in the list and choose the preset.

Price: $45

Requires: Mac OS X Leopard (10.5), Snow Leopard (10.6), Lion (10.7), and Mountain Lion (10.8)

2. Adobe Premiere Elements

Adobe Premiere Elements 10 is the newest update to Adobe’s popular consumer video editing application. Premiere Elements is inexpensive, well designed, and easy to learn. Premiere Elements has both a storyboard and a more traditional timeline view. You can polish, add effects and export to YouTube, HD Video or to DVD.

Premiere Elements 10 also has the unique capability to export to Blu-Ray, although the Mac has yet to gain Blu-Ray burning capability. You can also keyframe by keyframe edit effects and transitions.

Price: $79.99

Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later

3. Mac iMedia Converter

You may want to edit a file or post a video file and that file is not compatible with your system. When you run across this problem you need to convert the file. The easiest way is to use a file converter like iMedia Converter.

iMedia Converter is easy to use and accepts many file formats. It also includes batch convert functionality. As an added value, iMedia Converter includes direct conversion and ripping from a Blu-ray disc or DVD!

Price: $52

Requires: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

4. Final Cut Pro X

Sometimes you just need a real pro tool for the job. When those times call, answer with Final Cut Pro X! Apple upped in 2011 the ante by releasing Final Cut Pro X for only $299.99. FCPX has gained speed improvements, ease of use improvements, and many of iMovie’s looks and features. Although I still use FCP 8, FCPX is awesome for many projects and will come in handy if you get real serious.

Final Cut Pro X has many features to covet. The best includes magnetic timeline, built-in audio editor, a new 64bit architecture, faster rendering, built in effects, and a simpler to use color grading effect. Being that the price is hundreds of dollars lower the FCStudio, I could not recommend it enough.

Price: $299.99

Requires: Mac OS X 10.6.8 or later

5. Aurora3DAnimation

If you want to make your own 3D text or logo animation, normally you would have to use complex 3D graphics software and animate it yourself in After Effects. This is a tedious process that requires a huge skill set and thousands of dollars. With Aurora3DAnimation, you can easily create and animate 3D text and logos the exact way you want them without learning new skills. It could not be any easier!

Aurora3DAnimation offers beautifully designed templates, freehand control, light control, a built in graphic library, and excellent export capabilities. At only $49.99 you are not only saving hundreds of dollars, but many headaches!

Price: $49.99

Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later; 64-bit processor

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