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Category: Video editing/effects
Developer: Creaceed
System Requirements: Intel-based Mac, Mac OS X v10.6, 64 MB VRAM
Review Computer: 2.2GHz 13” Macbook Pro, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM
Network Feature: No
Processor Compatibility: Intel
Price: $39.95 while in Beta, $59.95 for final version
Availability: Out now in Beta

One of the hassles of dealing with “pro” level software is that quite often it won’t do something simple you need it to because, well, that’s not how professionals do things. Page layout programs—perfect example—won’t let you italicize any text the way Word does—you have to have the italic version of the font.

Likewise, video editing and effects can be a pain if you’re looking for a simple fix, or tools that are common in photo editing. Elasty HD is a box full of odd and useful things that can be difficult, impossible, or expensive to find in another application.

Elasty HD has four categories of effects. The first brings photo-type controls: crop, flip and (hallelujah) rotate video with a click. Also included is a basic image stabilization function, designed to steady video from a hand-held. Generally speaking, this works well, though you’ll want to combine it with the crop function to prevent the black edges of the frame from creeping into the video.

The next function, Probes, is combined with the third function, Effects, so I’ll talk about them in reverse order. The Effects are simple layovers: beating hearts, distortion, halftones, streaks of light, and even a blur if you want to pretend you’re on COPS. Simple, cheesy, and fun. The Probes allow these static effects to move around the screen. Pick the point where you want to add the effect (like a blur to a face), drop the probe on it, and Elasty will attempt to track where the face moves to in the video. You can tweak it if it goes too far off, but in my tests I found it to be surprisingly accurate, though not flawless.

The fourth function is “retiming;” that is, slowing down and speeding up film. You do this by setting key points to a time line, then dragging those keys up and down to adjust the speed. The advantage of this is that you can have both kinds of time-warping effect in one movie, allowing you give your subjects superhuman speed, then slowing down to a drag as they do something dramatic.

All of these effects are rendered on-the-fly in Elasty’s preview window, though obviously the more effects you add, the more it’ll strain your system and the program’s capabilities. Once you’re ready to export, you can easily choose to render the whole movie or a specific time period, along with the option of exporting just the video or just the audio.

Speaking of audio, one rather notable drawback of Elasty is that you can’t preview the audio at all, nor can you add it to a movie you’re working on.

What impressed me most about Elasty is how simple it is to learn; it takes little time to pick up how the tracking spots work, and how to arrange and layer the effects. There’s a lot of tweaking involved to get it looking exactly right, but that’s true of any video editing software—it’s the nature of the beast.

Elasty HD exists somewhere between iMovie and the effects that come with your camera. It’s certainly not going to replace iMovie as an editor; think of it more like a Swiss Army Knife for quick video fixes. It’s out as a paid beta right now, and its target market—budding filmmakers and YouTube junkies—should check out its capabilities.