Software Review

One of the best products that I've ever used for video editing is Scenalyzer Live. Most people have never heard of Scenalyzer and that's unfortunate because it is the best video capturing software out there.

Scenalyzer is a specialized program that allows you to capture video from your analog or video tapes. I have hundreds of tapes and it used to take me hours to fast forward through tape after tape looking for a particular scene.

I use Scenalyzer to create a visible representation of the tape (called an index) so that I can see exactly what is on the tape from beginning to end. With digital video I can see the time and date of every clip as well.

Recently I made a video for my daughter that chronicled her progression with the violin from the age of 6 to 12 years old. It would have been ridiculously time consuming to look for all that footage over dozens of tapes. With Scenalyzer I was able to look over the "index" of each tape, select the scenes I wanted within the tape (I looked for my daughter holding her violin), and create a new "batch capture list".

Then all I had to do was put the tape into my camera and tell Scenalyzer to go through the tape and only capture the scenes that I had selected. The program controls the camera and I can leave and come back later with all my clips captured and stored on my hard drive.

Scenalyzer has several additional features, but the indexing and batch capturing features alone make it worth the price.

Scenalyzer is available for download http://www.scenalyzer.com/main.html (I haven't seen it any stores). You can download Scenalyzer and try it out before you buy it.