BoinxTV, a software video mixer with high end features, is about to be released in November 11th. The product, by the award winning company Boinx, is pushing the envelope in semi-pro video productions and live events.
The product enables users to mix up to three sources (pre-recorded media, or live cameras), add transitions, lower thirds, overlays, logos, and live elements to the video feed and record it as a quicktime file or upload it to Apple’s podcast producer.
When you launch the software, you can chose a show template – news, hi-tech, sports, or blank template.
Based on your choice, a complex and unintuitive interface is opened, that allows you to define which overlays should be used, titles, lower thirds, transitions and logos.
Though filled with options and out of the box graphics, it took me a while to learn how to operate this tool. Having said that, it is still much simpler (and cheaper) then learning After Effects or other post production tools.
This application is very appealing to churches, local football teams, schools, and other communities looking for a cheap and easy to use tool that will give their video production a bit of a boost. The same goes for video podcasters. However, it has some major disadvantages:
1. It doesn’t support live broadcasting – unlike CamTwist, BoinxTV is only for recording media, not live broadcasting. This is a major disadvantage as its live mixing abilities are impressive, and could make the life of blogtv and ustream broadcasters much simpler, and improve their production value.
2. The interface is not easy to use at all. it took me a while to get the UI concept – even though Boinx make some amazing apps.
3. Many of its features can be found in free alternative, though online, such as Mogulus.
4. And on a personal note, I don’t really like applications which promise too much before they are able to deliver it. They do make post production easier, for a very specific segment of users, but this is still not a substitute for post production applications such as After Effects. Therefore, their notion of “Say Goodbye to Post Production” is a little overdoing it in my opinion.
You can follow the application’s twitter account, watch an interview with the company, and read more about the application here.
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Thank you for your review. Some additional remarks:
- We should have specified “up to three cameras per layer” (think of ‘layers’ like in Photoshop) perhaps.
- For the UI, we choose a fresh approach that may alienate broadcasters who were used to doing their work in the same way in the last 30 years. But we think it will be more accessible for Podcasters and creative Mac users who are familiar with the layer concept of Photoshop.
- BoinxTV save its recordings to disk, but you can, of course, do live broadcasting via the video-out port.
- “Say goodbye to post production” may be bold statement, but it’s becoming true for all the video podcasters who have to spend many hours editing their takes to get a professional looking result. BoinxTV is for them.