Any video editing tool must be immediately compared to my personal favorite, the well-reviewed VideoSpin ($15). By comparison, SolveigMM Video Splitter is esoteric and difficult to use. I ran numerous trials with a sample video file, attempting to make it smaller, split it up into individual pieces, and so on. Eventually, through trial and error, I figured it out.
Clicking anywhere in SolveigMM Video Splitter's video timeline and clicking creates a triangle marker. A space between two markers can be snipped out or marked as saved, and then the entire group of marked-out video can be saved in one new edited file or one file for each fragment. This isn't very intuitive, so a video tutorial would be helpful here.
Once you do figure it out, splitting a longer video into 10-minute chunks suitable for YouTube is a snap--if that's all you want to do. There's a whole lot more to video editing than that, even if the series of tubes is your only destination. SolveigMM Video Splitter would be really handy if it could edit the audio track of a video file separately (or at all). As it is, regardless of how you edit the video, you're stuck with whatever audio is left over in the split files, which could be jarring.
When I edit video, splitting it into pieces is only one of the many things I like to do. Adding text, fading or animating between segments, saving as a different file format, or burning to a CD are all things that SolveigMM Video Splitter can't do: it's stuck saving the modified video file in the same format as the original file, for example. The aforementioned VideoSpin can do all that, and it's free. And VideoSpin can also do all the splitting that SolveigMM Video Splitter does, too. I'm sticking with VideoSpin for now. Though SolveigMM Video Splitter is a promising app that's worth watching-- it just needs to be more versatile.
Note: This demo has a nag screen, and it shows logos on some frames edited with the splitter. The full version costs 30 Euros; price is given in U.S. dollars on the day this review was posted.
--Steve Horton
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