The development of Smart Edit 5 has now advanced far enough to be able to state the news and changes it will contain. Here are the news!

HDV editing is of course the most important new feature. We have worked hard to develop a software solution that delivers immaculate quality, works even on the smaller, slower machines, and does not slow editing down to a painful level. With the dual standard editing method, we have achieved that goal.

The user can edit in DV, using all existing equipment, and with at the same speed as always. In the background, the system applies all edititing

decisions and effects to the HDV footage. This requires reading in the footage twice, first in DV mode, then in HDV mode. The three possible output formats shall be: HDV, DV and DVD.  Solitaire owners may choose to not read in the material twice, but have the system render the DV material from the HDV footage (because the Solitaire is so fast that the conversion is faster than real time).

With the introduction of the Claro, MacroSystem released the first Casablanca that does not need a video monitor. Even though it is always nice to see the video material on a true video monitor, using just a VGA (flat screen) display unit has become more and more fashionable. SE 5 shall alow the user to use just the VGA screen on all machines (for all VGA equipped units). Video plays back on the VGA screen as well.

SE 5 allows the creation of Audio CDs. You can select audio pieces from the audio menu, and then burn an audio CD from that material. By using the scene-to-sample-function, you can also burn a CD from the audio captured with you video cam. Another new feature is the enhanced edit-to-rhythm function. SE 5 has a special tool for this purpose. One starts it in the audio menu, and the system plays back the selected audio sample. Then, by clicking on the trackball button, the user can follow up the rhythm. So far, so good - but now the change: The system automatically creates a storyboard with black video and the selected audio. All individual scenes are automatically lined up in perfect order, a playback plays black video with the selected audio piece. But a new scene appears every time the user clicked to the rhythm (these black scenes are marked with a special symbol.) Now it is possible to use the insert function to replace the "placeholder" scenes with real video - but the length is automatically trimmed to perfection (of course, the scenes need to be long enough for that).

Various changes will be made, nothing absolutely revolutionary, but features like freely positionable boxes with auto-removal of all other windows.
The titler indeed works in combination with HDV material.

A few small, but long awaited changes:

- Smart Rendering is now selectable in different priorities, one can turn the somewhat awkward order of rendering around (so the first effect gets rendered first, then the second and so on).

- Effects generated from SmartRendering will appear after the scene it has been generated from, rather than at the end of the scene bin.

- Trimming is now done using a de-interlaced full frame rather than just one field.

- Freely selectable inputs for the record timer.

Of course, many smaller changes and minor corrections will also be taken care of.