After capturing those priceless videos with your camcorder or your favorite TV shows, you edit and convert them to DVDs or compressed DivX format to save disk space. The bundled software that comes with your camcorder or digital camera offers limited features, so what if you need to correct an underexposed video, rectify the colors or join two videos into a single DivX file? TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress makes such tasks a cakewalk and doesn’t require knowledge of even basic video editing.

TMPGEnc XPress features a very user-friendly interface. The main window has a toolbar with buttons for one-click access to four major sections: Start, Source, Format and Encode. Since video editing is a process, you progress to the next section when you’re done with the one you’re currently working on. The Start section has a subsection with tools for batch encoding and splitting/merging audio and video streams. The Cut-edit section lets you clip unwanted portions such as advertisements. A large thumbnail of the video is displayed right on top followed by the waveform of the accompanying audio. A filmstrip view displaying the frames along with their position is very useful for precisely selecting portions within a video.

After editing you move on to enhance the video using filters. Eliminating the black bands on top and bottom, adjusting the brightness and contrast, enhancing colors, increasing the sharpness and reducing noise are all possible. Applying a filter easy, just select it from the list.

The Format section has templates for standalone video players as well as different formats. TMPGEnc XPress automatically takes care of the bit rate and audio format. You can also encode videos to MPEG, AVI, WMV, DivX and MP4 formats. Setting the bit rate such that the final output fits exactly on a CD or DVD doesn’t require you to do any math. You can also tell the software to combine multiple videos into a single file or output each video as a separate file.

TMPGEnc XPress has a couple of features that deserve a special mention. In addition to the standard MPEG and AVI formats, it supports DivX, MP4, FLV and videos captured in .M2TS format with an AVCHD camcorder. In addition to videos, the software also supports slideshows with plenty of transition effects.

The most striking feature of TMPGEnc XPress is support for Nvidia's CUDA. If you have a GeForce 8 series card or better, you can harness the power of the GPU for encoding. With a GeForce GTX 280 graphics card fitted in our test computer, it took only 6 minutes to encode a 4 minute MPEG video captured with a TV tuner card to MP4 format. With CUDA disabled in the preferences, the quad-core processor took twice as long to complete the same job.

With the ability to edit videos and convert them to a DVD or shrink them to less than one-tenth their size, TMPGEnc Xpress is a great tool to have if you own a digital camera, camcorder or a PMP. It shines when it comes to ease of use and versatility, but we feel the inclusion of video output templates for popular handheld devices such as iPods and PSPs would have sweetened the deal. But overall, it’s a great application for both beginners and advanced users at $99.95 USD (Rs 4,800 approx).