Thugs at Bay’s Zwei-Stein and ZS4
Quick and Fast: Some good video compositers, but not very intuitive for beginners.
Where to get it: Original Zwei-Stein (v3.01) - http://www.thugsatbay.com/tab/?q=zweistein_download
ZS4 - http://www.zs4.net/
First off, let’s get one thing straight. It’s pronounced Tsvi - Stine; not Zwee - Steen. This is german and I believe it mean Two Castle or Two Place. I don’t know why the program is called that, other than it was made by two people. From what I found, Thugs at Bay is a two person, european music group who needed a software for making their music videos. So this is what they came up with. I think the name was shortened to t@b somewhere around the release of ZS4.
Zwei-Stein is a little confusing at first and the interface seems a little counter-intuitive to me. There doesn’t seem to be any playback of your video or motion graphics, something I prize highly in a video program. After all, what good is it to make something you can’t play back before rendering? The effects seem ok.
A while ago, the 4th version of Zwei-Stein came out and is called ZS4. ZS4 is different enough that it got it’s own brand new website and set of tutorials. I highly recommend the tutorials. If I thought the original Zwei-Stein is confusing, ZS4 is more so! And I still don’t see any playback capabilities! Even so, many people love it. The process you have to go through to make simple stuff (like text animations) just blows my mind, though. I decided it isn’t worth it and deleted the program.
In writing this review, I went back and looked around the ZS4 website again. You seem to get good results after all and I’ll check back later on. The site promises you choice over clarity after all and the effects were rather impressive sounding. Oh, well, check it out. You might be glad you did.
Tutorials: The tutorials for the original Zwei-Stein are inside the program itself and there are only 4. You can figure it out from there.
The ZS4 tutorials are at: http://www.zs4.net/tutorials?PHPSESSID=f5132062519e381d2e1521a85fb08663
License and Use: Free for any kind of use. For more info, go to http://www.zs4.net/downloads
