On balance, there was a lot to like about Ikena. It's easy to learn, easy to use, and if you have some decent video to start with ... it produces some decent results. It has the basics covered, basic colour and light controls, cropping, still image export, and it even allows you to export your finished product as an uncompressed AVI file.
There's also a lot to Ikena that I didn't like. For the price, I would have liked a built-in screen capture utility. I would have liked the aspect ratio issue fixed before releasing it to the "forensic community" at full price. I certainly would have liked better documentation - though their staff made every effort to answer my questions honestly and thoroughly. I'm one of those people that likes to get my hands on the manual and actually read it.
We're a small community of users. I understand this completely. It's tough to make enough profit on a product in this market to justify the development expenses. At the same time, we don't want to be treated as a vertical marketing opportunity for an existing product - at least without making that product suit our needs. We want what we want for specific reasons, reasons that you'll find throughout this blog. If we see a product that doesn't deliver what we want, then we wait. Unfortunately for MotionDSP, there's nothing in Ikena that makes me want to spend over $7k of my hard earned (and deflating) dollars right now. And ... if I won't spend my own money on a product, I'm sure not going to recommend that my friends do anything different.
So, overall I feel the same way about Ikena as I did about ClearID - or other 1st versions of software for the "forensic" marketplace. It's a good first step. I'm hoping that they'll take my review, and the reviews of others in the field and strengthen their product for the next release.
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