At the top of the GUI are two tabs labeled 1-Edit and 2-Make Movie. Once your movie has been assembled, and you're ready to share it with the world, switching over to the Make Movie tab replaces the editing GUI with rendering tools. These will render the movie in a variety of formats, as well as automatically upload an Adobe Flash version of your movie directly to YouTube. To create an eight-minute 99.3-megabyte Windows Media file on my dual-core 3.40GHz PC, the render time was about 30 minutes, which seems comparable to most video-editing programs. One nice touch: the timeline scrolls from beginning to end, making it easy to see how far the program has gone in the rendering process.

VideoSpin is about as simple as an editing program can get. For the person who simply wants to upload family videos to the web or for the garage band that wants to create its first music video, it should be a painless way to dip your toes into the world of video. Anyone beyond that will want to eschew VideoSpin for much more full-featured programs. In fact, just about the time you learn what a codec is, you'll probably want to upgrade programs. But until then, give VideoSpin a spin.

Platform: Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and Vista
Processor: Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon 1.4GHz minimum, 2.4GHZ or higher recommended
Memory: 512MB RAM, 1GB recommended; 1GB required for Vista (2GB recommended)
Hard Drive: 150MB of disk space to install software
Other: DirectX 9 or higher-compatible graphics card with 64MB (128MB recommended)

• Easy for beginners to get started.
• Extremely intuitive GUI.
• Direct YouTube upload capability.

• Highly limited in its features.
• Likely to be outgrown quickly

Fairly painless way for absolute beginners to get started editing and uploading video. May be too simplistic for those with even a modicum of video editing experience.

Ed Driscoll is a freelance journalist covering home theater and the media.

Pinnacle Systems, Inc.
280 North Bernardo Avenue
Mountain View, CA 94043
www.videospin.com

Free download; Codecs for MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DiVX: $15