BMKS iMovie products offer fun, versatility
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
May 23, 2004 at 11:10pm
If you’re an iMovie user, you must add BKMS Software Development’s various plug-in sets to your collection. There are four sets; each set contains between two and seven plug-ins and each plug-in offers up to twelve options. You can purchase the plug-ins individually (at US$8 apiece) but buying the will save you money in the long run. Once you’ve tried one of BKMS’ iMovie plug-ins, you’ll want the others. (Various plug-ins are available in different bundles from the BKMS Web site, as well.)
Flip Flop Fly ($20) and Flip Fly 2 ($25) are two collections of 3D transitions that include rotating cubes, flipping postcards, swing doors and shuffling cards. All Squeeze ($20) offers three iMovie plug-ins with 20 transitions, such as rotate, “squeeze-n-stretch,” pixel dissolve, zig zap, melt-in, flip and soft wipes. Smooth Wipes ($13) offers soft-edged wipes, plus an iris telescope effect that telescopes down to a point (a la the old silent movies). Block Wipes ($12) offer checkboard squares that slide to show a new image, plus zig zap and straight wipes.
Using the All Melts Transitions ($20), images melt through each other, or in, or out, with either dark or light areas first. The All Pixels set ($20) breaks images into squares with more squares showing the new image with each frame.
The wipes transitions are the high points of BKMS’ iMovie goodies. They offer excellent wipe transitions, something experienced iMovie users will love. If you can only afford one of BKMS’ sets, this is the one to spring for.
Something else you might want to add to your wish list is BKMS’ PluginPal, the US$19.95 “clutter cutter for iMovie.” It gives you a list of your installed titles, transitions, and effects, and lets you turn them on and off. (It will even enable and disable the effects, transitions, and titles that shipped with iMovie itself.) You can save a setting for a given project, and recall settings from a popup menu. You can override a setting, save a setting under a new name, or delete settings you no longer use.
This valuable, time saving utility also displays a plug-in’s name and a list of the effects, titles or transitions it provides. What’s more, if youve already placed plug-ins in subfolders, PluginPal will preserve the folder layout.
All these BKMS products work with iMovie 2.1.1 and higher, including iMovie 4.
Macsimum rating (all the products): 10 out of 10.
Have a product you’d like us to review? Drop us an e-mail at dsellers@macsimumperspective
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
