The Playstation 3 as a Video Editor

It's not often that we suddenly receive new tools for free, but with the recent release of PS3 firmware 3.40, many of us Playstation 3 owners got just that.

While Sony was touting the Playstation Plus network features, I was more interested in the new video editor and uploader. With this tool, you can combine and trim video clips, add titles, and even slow down or speed up time.

I was delighted to see this new menu item in my XMB after upgrade to 3.40.

The editor has a very simple, easy to use interface.

In the first step (not shown), you select video clips from your PS3's hard drive, and add them to a timeline.

The second step is the main video editor, shown here. This editor has the following options (clockwise from the top-right):

• Playback Speed: Lets you speed up or slow down (by 2x in either direction) specific segments of your video.
• Music: Lets you add one of a handful of preselected (and somewhat cheesy) soundtracks.
• Text: Add titles and other text to your video in various fonts and formats.
• A-B Erase: Trim sections of your video.

Right off the bat, two of the four of these are failures in my mind. "Music" could have been a huge feature, but for reasons that I can only imagine come down to licensing fears (Sony is also a music company, after all), you are not able to select a soundtrack from any of your personal audio tracks available on the hard drive of your PS3. We won't stop to question how it's any less legally ambiguous to be publishing any video from your hard drive, while somehow music is exempt.

The second useless option is "Text"- at least, if you plan on uploading to YouTube. Please, use YouTube's text overlay features instead- they are nearly as flexible, and (most importantly) they allow the user to turn them off. There's no reason to burn this stuff into your video- unless the PS3 offered some really cool text effects, which it does not.

Moving on to what's great- "A-B Erase" is easy to use, and functions just as it should. "Playback Speed" was the big surprise, to me. It works as well as you can expect, though the speed selection being limited to 50% and 200% is a bit disappointing.

Here is a quick test video I made that exercised all of these features. It took me only a few minutes to throw together. I use MediaLink, which was $20 paid software. It works flawlessly as a solution for playing iTunes music and video over the PS3- and, fortunately, also works for showing photos and video from iPhoto as well.

With MediaLink, I was able to browse my iPhoto library on my PS3, choose a clip, copy it to the PS3's hard drive, and then launch the video editor and import it right in. It was amazingly easy.

I'm not sure what Sony's intention is with this tool, exactly. To my knowledge, there are only a handful of games that support video capture- and I think you just upload to YouTube straight from the game, generally. If they were to announce global video capture ability built-in to the PS3, that would really be something- and would put this tool in context.

But, for now, it's something of a curiosity- which can be a pretty fun toy for us video enthusiasts to play with.