what editing program?
 

Hi guys,

Just starting out with video and should get my hv20 tomorrow.

I use a PC running XP. what editing program would you suggest I use, something simple to begin with.

Thanks for any help,

Steve UK
ps I'm using the cam for home use to begin with.

Well I got it today!

Just been doing a bit of filming, in auto wouldn't you know it.
Played it back on standard tv and the colours look great, nice and
vivid.

Even the wife was impressed, Phew that's a relief!

But why did they put the record button there? It would
have been a lot better where the Set button is. Don't you think?

Best,

Steve

vegas 7 is a good editing program wont do the pull down if that means any thing for you but if its just for home use it wont matter

As our "mate" Steve is from the UK, a beautiful PAL country, pulldown and its removal will never be an issue for him! ;)

But seriously, Steve:

Martin's recommendation is good, but Sony Vegas 7 might be a bit expensive for a beginner, so I'd suggest you have a look at the Vegas Movie Studio version. You might want to have a look at Adobe Premiere Elements 3, as well. It's also HDV ready, suitable for beginners and quite inexpensive (about 60£).

I suggest you download both trial versions and decide for yourself what suits you best.

Regards

Enea

Thanks ever so much guys.

Much appreciated,

Steve.
ps I'm glad I don't have to bother with pulldown ha!

Any comments on how Ulead Video Studio 11+ compares for us beginers?
Thanks
Nathan

Try it before you buy, Ulead offers a full 30-day trial. Here's the link.

http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satelli...nloadContainer

Does Windows Movie Maker work in PAL land??? Its a good program to start with as its free....

Download the trials for both.
I have Ulead MSPro8, VS11+ works similarly for HDV far as I can tell, probably OK for beginners- but the issue is Ulead programs currently don't edit M2T, but convert to MPG2 PS during capture- losing the scene/datestamp metadata. So you have to split by scene manually.
You can use HDVsplit to capture scene-split M2T files, but Ulead will still convert to MPG, so time/space wasted a bit.

Vegas7 will capture w/ scene splits for HDV and edit M2T natively, and Movie Studio should so same... that's a big win.
the limits I didn't like for Movie Studio was in the DVD MPG rendering, as far as I recall it only would create a fixed bitrate like 8Mbps :( VERY poor (since I like to make 2hr videos.)
VS11+ may have some more advanced/integrated features otherwise (eg burning HD-DVD etc), but you might not need/be able to use them (who has an HD burner??)

download the trial versions, user manuals and such and compare. A lot of it is what you are used to re UI and workflow too so it's personal.

Sony also has a stripped down version of Vegas called Movie Studio, Platinum. It handles HDV and also has a stripped version of DVD Architect and a sound program, again a stripped down version of ACID, on board... - All for about $100 US. Bought this about a year ago, and I assume same package is available, and I think it may even get you into discount land if you upgrade to Vegas 7 or higher later..... sorry, I guess I repeated what was indicated above...

>Vegas7 will capture w/ scene splits for HDV and edit M2T natively
>, and Movie Studio should so same... that's a big win.

Unfortunately, it won't. Vegas 7 Movie Studio Platinum does NOT split the scenes. The Vegas7 Pro version does, because it had 5 updates since its release, while VMS had only 1.

Unfortunately, if you use HDVSplit instead, it adds black frames at the end of each scene, and so when you place them inside Vegas, you have black transitions you want it or not (you will have to remove them manually).

Moreover, Vegas' HDV playback in its Preview window is really slow (3 Ghz P4 Hyperthreaded here). I am personally considering a refund after my VMS-Platinum purchase 2 weeks ago.

Sorry I was a bit short on detail above. While, I've used Ulead Video Studio for a long while (and have the 11+ demo installed) I am also happy to swap to another prog that suites better. The problem I have is with the workflow I want does not really work:

Ideal Workflow for me is: HDV 1080i - PAL (but using 25p setting) --> Capture and Split by Scene with Date/Time stamp info available --> Simple Edits (nothing fancy) --> output as a HDV PS (not TS) for playback on an HTPC without transcoding non modified sections.

Current Issues with my proposed workflow and the tools I have (I've posted on the Ulead forum and it seems there is no workaround using their progs)
1) VS11+ will not split the capture by scene (but could use HDVSplit), but will bring the footage in as PS (my prefered output format).
2) HDVSplit works great for Capture/Split but VS11+ unfortunatly imports the files as Frame Based NOT interlaced Top Feild first so when it comes to saving the project out as HDV PS TFF it wants to transcode the whole timeline.
3) I could potentally live with HDV TS fles but would then need to change my direct draw filters on my HTPC to get sutter free TS files playing (PS already just plays perfectly....)

Edit - Any shortlist of Progs that do the proposed workflow would be great!

Thanks
Nathan

Vegas Movie Studio 7 Platinum will NOT do what you want (as I said above, I am thinking of getting a refund). Vegas 7e (which is the pro version, and have had 5 updates so far), WILL do what you want. But the difference in price is that of $400.

Hi Steve, I'm in the Warrington Cine and Video Society, not a million miles from you. I use Avid Liquid 7 which works well but it is not the easiest program to use. Our members seem to find that Adobe Premiere Elements 3 is easy to use and cheap.
I am assuming that you have a fast enough processor and enough Ram or you may be better off editing in standard def.

Bill

IIRC, this needs to be Vista. I know the XP version does not handle HDV. I have not tried HDV in Vista yet. Since he is using XP, that would not be an option.

Thanks Guys for your help.

Good to know you're just up the road Bill.

Looks though, I'll have to upgrade to Vista sometime then.

cheers,

Steve.

Vegas is nice, but try editing anything HDV longer than 10 minutes or 30 M2T files and it crashes... at least for me. I have 7e on Vista with 2GHz Core2 4MB cache, 2GB Ram.

Vegas Movie Studio 8 Platinum was released this week and now supports HDV scene splitting. More over, as long as you DON'T use Vista, regarding the slow preview issue, you can edit the "settings/video" and change the "dynamic RAM" to at least 400 MBs. Make sure you have at least 1 GB of RAM to do that though.

Vegas Video & like
 

I'd simply use Vegas Video and the lower end counterpart to start with - excellent manual, does the job, stable, and works extremely well for me.

You can go with alternative like Premiere Elements, too, but do expect to know that all of these programs require a little bit of learning (best taken care of by any of those books that show you in big photos step-by-step how to do things).

That said, I found VV to be the only program I could pick up right away w/o reading the manual, so it was the easiest program for me to learn years ago.

---

Many years later, still making great videos using VV, so no problems here.

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as for scene splitting, I tend never to use this feature because all it does is to create dozens or hundreds of tiny files I have to import and work with. Far easier for me to import it as one big file, then use VV to split the video up where I want and all -- very easy to do. That way, it's physically still one big file even though it's been cut up into many individual files on the timeline.

---

ULEAD Video Studio 11+
 

FYI - I've decided to use VS11+ to capture HDV footage (over HDVSplit) mainly becuase the files it creates are MPEG-ProgramStream not MPEG-TransportSream - and for me this means:

+'ve : PS is good for me I keep everything on an HTPC and many codecs like PS better than TS and I can use smart encoding to avoid the time / transcoding effort on converting to PS.

-'ve : No Time/Date stamp so no "Split by Scene" during capture. You can use "Split by Scene - based on content" and this is OK but takes another real time pass.

Thanks
Nathan