Review: United Media On-Line Express

Are You a Seasoned On-line Linear Tape Editor? You'll Feel Comfortable With On-Line Express.

United Media is a seasoned company that's been around for over 20 years. In contrast to many nonlinear editing products that came up through the ranks of computerdom, it's a company that was founded by editors, for editors. It started its life selling linear edit systems using a controller attached to good-old-fashioned tape machines. The appeal of United Media's products is that, because of its experience with this long line of editing systems steeped in the tradition of linear edit suites of the 80s, the company is able to make sure that seasoned editors in the 2000s who cut their teeth on linear systems will feel comfortable with this system. If you compare edit systems to wristwatches, most contemporary systems are like the digital models with all their modes and settings. If you want to set or change anything, you must first push the mode switch. On-line Express could be compared more to an analog watch with a quartz movement -- while it can still do its job as accurately as a digital watch, it's a little easier to deal with, especially for those who grew up in the analog world. The result is a solid cutter, and best of all, it's able to get the most out of its up-to-date underbelly, the highly capable Matrox DigiSuite hardware.

United Media's edit controller While On-Line Express's impressive pixel-pushing power under the hood is unmistakable, on the outside its human interface is a model of simplicity. In its nearly mode-free interface, menus are almost not needed. For instance, to switch from insert editing to ripple editing, it's not necessary to go and select a ripple tool. Just click the clip to select it and drag and drop it wherever you want. Click on an unselected clip and it drags all the shots in the timeline along with it, giving you ripple editing. That's a straightforward approach that's hard not to like. It's especially favored by tape editors because of United Media's own edit controller, which the company calls its remote shuttle knob (pictured at right). Active on clip windows and on the timeline itself, this familiar-feeling widget is particularly welcome when it's time to shuttle tapes around at capture time, where you can digitize and operate the deck with a jog/shuttle control.

It's obvious that when this software was designed, the goal was to create an editor that was fast, user friendly, and organized everything with innovative media management tools. According to United Media, the designers of On-Line Express set out to solve four basic problems of media management: How are you inputting clips?, Where are you putting them?, How will you find them?, and how will you assemble them on the timeline? Let's take a closer look at this system and see how these questions have been successfully addressed.

Digitizer

[Click for larger image] On-Line Express Digitizer window.

Starting with the digitize interface, here's a great feature that I haven't seen in other systems: you can be creating new bins as you go, directly from the digitize interface (pictured at left). Some systems allow you to pre-create your bins, and then capture, but you don't always know which bins you'll need. And the capturing process feels like a linear suite, where you mark in and out points on the jog shuttle controller. Adding to the convenience is the ability to call up this digitize window on any computer, even if it doesn't have the DigiSuite hardware installed, allowing you to edit your batch list EDL without tying up a system. This would come in handy if, say, you have a VHS dub of your footage with time code burned into a window superimposed over the video. You can simply write a time code batch list for capturing later. Working in concert with this is the ability to rout scenes to bins you've created offline. And, once you have your shots captured into bins, the Bin View lets you play clips as they sit in the bin, and then find a meaningful index frame with a button click. And by the way, you may wonder where the file/save button is. Well, there isn't one, because every move you make is written into an open database. Every thing you do, such as keystrokes, dragging with the mouse, or anything else, is saved. If you want to undo, you can then make unlimited steps back through that database.

Next Page: Moving Clips Around