Reviews
Kinoma
Producer 2
Premier media conversion toolkit for Palms
When
Peter Hoddie, former head of QuickTime development at Apple Computer,
started Kinoma in 2002, we all expected something interesting
to emerge. We were not to be disappointed. The startup soon delivered
Kinoma Producer, desktop software for converting video files from
most common computing formats and optimizing them for playback
on Palm-powered handhelds, using their freely distributed Kinoma
Player.
Now the company
has released their first major update of both pieces of their
media toolkit, now both at version 2. Not surprisingly, Producer
leverages the power of QuickTime on both platforms and it does
not require you to spend the additional $30 on the Pro version
to do its magic. QuickTime is preinstalled on every Mac and Windows
PC, or users can download it free from www.quicktime.com.
Producer
supports a huge array of media formats:
ð Video: MPG, MOV, MP1, MP4, AVI, DivX, DV
ð Audio: AIFF, AU, MP3, WAV
ð Image: JPEG, BMP, Photoshop (PSD), PICT, PNG, Targa, TIFF
ð Animation: GIF, Macromedia Flash (no audio), FLC
The
heart of Producer is the encode window. You can drag one or a
bunch of media files onto it and batch process them using a single
destination encoding. There are default settings optimized for
each Palm handheld brand, along with a generic setting suitable
for any Palm device. These settings are carefully tuned for best
performance on your target PDA, though you can alter them any
way you wish. I encoded some large MOV and MPG files for my Tapwave
Zodiac, experiencing no problems with the results. When I started
tweaking the settings for higher frame rate and better audio,
performance began to degrade and, in one extreme case, playback
froze halfway through a five-minute video, necessitiating the
old stab-in-the back warm reset. I learned my lesson, thereafter
sticking to Kinoma's recommended settings.
If you do
decide to experiment with customized settings to achieve greater
playback quality, by all means do so, as the only cost to you
is your time. You may wish to boost audio quality by using the
uncompressed option, as this will actually lessen the processor
load at playback time, though at the expense of a larget file
size. Other options worth a try are audio and video bit rates
as well as the frame rate. You can also opt to boost the audio
across the board so that the result sounds louder on devices with
wimpy speakers, though be careful you aren't inducing distortion
this way. Whatever you do, try out the results on both loud and
quiet environments. As a wise man once told me,
one test is worth a thousand expert opinions. You can save your
presets under any name you like for future use.
Producer offers
admirable control over the resulting file's look, with support
for background colors and static images, framing, and other aesthetic
considerations that help you get the look you desire. Final output
can even be exported as a desk of PowerPoint slides.
You'll want
Player 2 on your Palm device, as Producer 2 files don't play back
as smoothly on older versions. In addition to better performance,
the new rev contains support for five-way controllers and a cool
performance test to determine the maximum frame rate achievable
on your device. You open a movie 
clip,
then select the test from the menu. Player runs the clip from
start to finish as fast as it can, then pops up your results.
I ran the Matrix 2 movie trailer and achieved whopping 104.9 frames
per second on a Zodiac 1. Using my trusty ãoldä Tungsten T, I
achieved 38.4 fps running the same clip. Obviously, the Zodiac
is the preferred media delivery device running Palm OS.
Any late-model
Palm user interested in bringing their movies to the small screen
needs a copy of Kinoma Producer 2. There is no serious competition
and at $30 it's a steal.
-Edison Carter
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