Liquid 7

Liquid has always been an editor suffering from (or perhaps benefiting from) a personality crisis. It began life as Fast Blue – a competitor to Avid’s high-end editors selling at thousands of pounds. Fast was then bought by Pinnacle, and became Liquid Edition – a mid-range editor in competition with Premiere. Now, Avid has bought Pinnacle, and this latest release is the first version of Liquid under the Avid name.

Liquid looks and behaves as if it knows what it’s doing. The interface is designed for editors who edit – all day, every day. It’s clean and simple – effects panels and mixing desks appear only when you need them. When you don’t need them, the screen concentrates your attention on the job rather than the tools.

It’s still a little too professional for its own good – taking over your PC, replacing the Windows desktop with its own, altering the system colour scheme, and treating with disdain the possibility that you might actually want to run other programs as well.

On the plus side, Liquid 7 can handle a wide range of file types, combining them on the timeline. You can have DivX, MPEG and WMV files side-by-side, and Liquid will even capture direct to the new DivX format.

Effects filters are wide-ranging and powerful, and among the new inclusions in version 7 are various glow and softening effects. There’s also a range of filters, including strong new keying and colour correction tools, and a couple of snazzy particle and distortion effects.

New in version 7 is an Image Stabilisation tool, which allows you to remove camera shake from handheld or high-zoom images. The new release also moves the Timewarp function into real-time, which makes life easier if you’re trying to slow down or speed up a clip for a carefully synchronised effect. Timewarp allows you to alter the speed of a clip throughout its duration, to enable smooth changes in framerate. However, the effect lacks the frame reconstruction tools found in After Effects.

Liquid seems to be moving both upmarket and downmarket at the same time. It now handles highdefi nition footage even more smoothly, with increased HD preview and conversion choices. There’s also a very neat DVD authoring tool. You can drop DVD menus directly onto the timeline, and you have a pretty high degree of control over them.

Multi-camera editing is included, which can deal with as-live footage from up to 16 video sources, cutting between them as they play in the same way that a vision mixer would.

But there are some more downmarket additions, too, including Smartsound – a method for automatically generating royalty-free background music to any length using pre-written loops.

Edition has always struggled against Premiere and Final Cut, largely due to its interface, but this is a pleasure to use. We would have liked more changes now Avid is in charge, though.