NewTek Speed Edit Review for CGFocus
By: Timothy Albee

The life of an Independent Filmmaker is not an easy one. You often end-up having to do so many things yourself, (often when you originally had someone else commit to doing that thing for you).

As such, the Independent Filmmaker needs tools that are geared toward producing viable product with the minimum amount of "busywork" in achieving it. In other words, you need something that is productive, not something that merely gives the appearance of being productive.

You need tools that minimize mouse mileage; tools with interfaces laid-out and layered in such ways that let you correctly guess where a control is, or a technique is applied, even if you've never had time to read the manual, or never had need of that control or technique before. You need tools that have the foresight to provide you with the freedom you'll need, even if it may be years before you find yourself needing that job-saving tool.

You need tools that deliver what they promise, (without needing to buy extra stuff and scads of plug-ins, nor re-program a tool's shortcomings yourself!)

It is a weighty promise, for NewTek to make, calling its new, HD video-editor, the "World's Fastest Video Editor," but after nearly a month of dissecting it, using it on various projects of my own, I'd have to say that it lives up to its marketing in ways that are far too rare these days.

I've used a lot of video and audio editing tools in my time as an independent filmmaker, linear and nonlinear, analogue and digital, and I've found that while I can edit my own works when I have to, (which thus far has been always,) what I really want in an editing tool is something that lets me get the job done quickly so I can move on to what I really love doing: writing, direction and animation.

NewTek SpeedEDIT™ is an all-real-time, non-linear video editing package that supports editing in Progressive and Interlaced resolutions up to 2880x1920, at all major Drop and Non-Drop frame-rates from 12 to 60fps.

SpeedEDIT renders complex layers as a background task (while you're pondering what needs to be done next, without taking a single bit of responsiveness away from your interaction with the interface). This means no waiting for previews, everything is real-time, at full resolution, limited only by the "beefiness" of your own system and its disk and memory bandwidth!