Review: Norrkross Movie

• Article 12 of 19
• MacUser, July 2010

There is, however, competition for iMovie HD in the form of Norrkross Movie 2.0. This gathers together various core Mac technologies, including CoreVideo, CoreImage and the iLife media browser, to assemble a powerful editing and compositing program.

Rather than using the linear timeline of iMovie HD, Norrkross Movie uses GarageBand’s system of multiple tracks. Starting with the empty default track, you add clips by dragging and dropping from the Finder or iLife media browser onto the track. You can add clips at any point in a track so clips can overlap or leave gaps, or you can create a new track and add the clip to that track instead. Each clip sits on the overall movie canvas and you can resize the canvas and move and resize the clips relative to that canvas as well – if you want you can have several different clips all visible at the same time, you can. Tracks can also include audio, images, text and a variety of polygons from Norrkross’s library of shapes. Impressively, Norrkross Movie lets you see how your movie will look in real-time without the need for it to be rendered.

Largely, the interface is easier to use than iMovie HD. However, it’s not as easy to trim clips since you have to use the “Split Clip” tool to break clips into pieces then delete the unwanted parts. The canvas also has a default size so you’ll have to resize it to match your clips for simpler video editing projects.

As well as the ability to add media to your canvas, Norrkross Movie includes various transitions and filters that you can use to switch between clips. There are only nine transitions to iMovie’s 20 and if you’re a regular iMovie user, you might find yourself looking for one transition only to find it has another name (eg Dissolve instead of Cross Dissolve). It doesn’t help that the size of the Transitions palette means descriptions are always too long to fit onto the palette. But the transitions system in Norrkross is easier to understand than iMovie’s: a dissolve transition between two clips will highlight both clips with an appropriate icon and cause the clips to overlap; you can then move the clips to change the duration of the dissolve.

Where Norrkross also excels is in special effects. It has more than 80 filters which can be applied to images and videos – 23 layer compositing methods in this new version – and using them is very easy. Again, you just have just drag a filter from the media browser to a clip to add it as an effect. You can then alter the parameters of the effect as necessary. Norrkross also has a unique “effects view” that allows you to link several effects together to achieve a different look and alter their order. This includes a green-screen effect that allows you to specify a matte colour. With some work, it’s possible, for example, to combine two clips, have one superimposed on the other and have it move around the canvas, the green screen tracking it using keyframes.

Compared to iMovie HD, Norrkross is lacking a little polish and is slightly underfeatured. You can’t import footage from a video camera, add audio using a microphone, or upload to YouTube directly, for example. There’s no real clips management feature for you to organise projects, despite the new media resource manager. While you can access iLife sound effects, you can’t access iMovie’s and Norrkross comes with none of its own. There’s also no auto-save and Norrkross crashed several times when performing simple operations like delete.

While Norrkross’s claim that anyone can use Norrkross Movie without even reading the manual is at best partially true, it is relatively easy to use in practice, easier even than iMovie HD. For anyone wanting to make an effects-led video quickly and simply, it also easily outclasses iMovie HD. However, it’s not a fully featured video package and its audio capabilities are marginally inferior to iMovie HD’s, so it should be considered a useful and talented complement rather than a replacement.