Wed, 10 Oct 2012 Pro Player review
Check clips and their metadata quickly without opening your video editor.
- Manufacturer: Digital Heaven
- Manufacturer: Digital Heaven
- Pros: Great controls (JKL, IO, loop, jump back); Clear interface, well organised; Can play back most video codecs
- Cons: Only one clip can be opened at a time; No way to add notes to a clip; Can’t play back MPEG-1 or MPEG-2; Expensive for just a player appIt’s a clean interface that nevertheless packs a lot of information. Its focus is on playing a single video clip while displaying its information, and in that respect, it succeeds beautifully. Download the app to see if it'll work for you: you can play back up to 20 clips before you’ll be asked to pay for it.
- Price: £20.32
- Star rating:
Pro Player exists to solve a simple problem: looking through your clips without having to open up the behemoth Final Cut Pro X (or equivalent) nor the anaemic QuickTime Player X.
This app by Digital Heaven is designed for editors and even preserves the usual shortcuts they’re familiar with when previewing footage, namely the JKL keys to control playback (J goes backwards, K stops playback and L goes forwards). The interface is dominated by a large timecode with the video above it, and lower left is all the metadata about the opened clip like codec, frame rate, bit rate, dimensions, file size, etc.
It’s an easy app to control; you can set in and out points (again, using the industry standard I and O keys) to focus on just a specific part of your chosen clip, jump back 5 seconds (or more - depending on the value you set in the preferences), or loop playback. Full screen mode removes all data from the screen so you can focus and enjoy the video, and you can even see a file's transparency and alpha channels.
But the app’s name says it all: it’s a player. There’s no way of marking a video or embedding notes in its metadata: if you want to use clip 4 over clip 7, say, the only way you can remember that is by writing it down yourself. Annoyingly, and unlike QuickTime Player X, you can only have one clip open at a time, which makes comparing multiple takes difficult at best. When presenting to a client, though, it’s an ideal app which lets you focus on just the information you need.
Pro Player offers a clean interface yet manages to pack a lot of information within it
If you work with MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 files, be aware that Pro Player won’t be able to play them. Aside from that, and as far as we can tell, any file that QuickTime can play, Pro Player can handle.
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