You have to hand it to Apple’s iMovie and Adobe Premiere. Those programs give any aspiring director powerful, affordable tools for editing digital video-everything from vacation movies to a low-budget remake of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal , with the neighbor’s kid starring as Death. But unless you want to cough up a couple hundred bucks for a professional-quality jog-shuttle controller, you’re stuck hunting and pecking on a keyboard or fumbling with a mouse. Amateur moviemakers who don’t want to bust their budgets should zoom in on the ShuttlePro Multimedia Controller, from Contour Design (800/462-6678, www.contourdesign.com ). The ergonomic USB device offers pro capabilities at the consumer-friendly price of $100. A jog-shuttle knob gives you frame-by-frame control, and the ShuttlePro has 13 programmable buttons for frequently used commands. The ShuttlePro’s software is Mac-only, though a Windows driver may be out by mid-April. And that’s a plot twist that would make even Bergman happy.
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