Video editing software - what's best?

[chrisjl]

Having endured the sheer awfulness of the software that came with my analogue capture card, I'm looking for a better solution (and then I'll be wanting a DV camera...)

I don't want anything too OTT, but I do want to be able to do titles, transitions, and have a nice friendly way of synchronizing individual frames or scene cuts to beats in the background music.

Is the answer a Mac and iMovie, or Final Cut Pro, or is there a sensibly priced, high-performance PC based option?

(The uLead stuff that I've got moves at a crawl, despite having a top-notch system with buckets of RAM AND hardware MPEG-2 encode/decode)

[stevieb]

I use Adobe Premiere, I think LucaB uses this in the Surrey run Videos I thought it was easy to use and it works ok on my laptop. if you have a AMD processor this could be the reason that some software is slow as some software was written for the Intel Chipset.;

Steve

[getcarter]

Chris

I surprised that the Ulead software is slow. I have both Ulead Media Studio Pro 6 and Adobe Premiere on my system and they both run at roughly the same speed.

Before you spend loads of dosh, It may be worth...

* Checking that the version of Ulead is compatible with your OS

* If it is... uninstalling and reinstalling the software (making sure all other apps are off)

Steve



>> Edited by getcarter on Wednesday 7th January 20:28

[luca brazzi]

I'm using Pinnacle Studio 8 at the moment, and made Surrey Runs 2,3 and 4 using it. Very easy to learn, and even has the DVD authoring included in the package.

Just about to start learning how to use Premiere (looks horribly complicated) to see if it will help me make my videos better.

But if you're just starting out....£60 for Studio is peanuts for what you can get out of it.
hope this helps, LB

[nighthawkEP3]

Pinnacle Studio 8 for me and my mini DV

I tried the stuff supplied with my firewire card, Dazzle moviestar 5 but it was utter crap. Very pixelated when you made an Mpeg or AvI

Pinnacle on the other hand is a doddle,

[chrisjl]

getcarter said:

I surprised that the Ulead software is slow. I have both Ulead Media Studio Pro 6 and Adobe Premiere on my system and they both run at roughly the same speed.

I've got Ulead VideoStudio 5 (7 is the current version)

getcarter said:

Before you spend loads of dosh, It may be worth... * Checking that the version of Ulead is compatible with your OS

The FAQ on the www says it is (I'm on XP)

getcarter said:

* If it is... uninstalling and reinstalling the software (making sure all other apps are off)

Might give that a go. The speed really is abysmal at the moment (when a clip is dragged into the timeline and it draws some of the frames, it takes several seconds per frame).

Another gripe is that the GUI is designed to fit into 640x480 and it doesn't scale, meaning you're always scrolling around, causing endless repeats of the frame drawing tedium. Maybe I need to be looking at a higher end app.

[Edt]

If you can stretch to Premiere, then do. It's FAB for DV work. Has got all the filters, effects, and shiny bits you'd ever want, and you can setup the interface to be as NASA or Noddy as you want.

Ed

[chrisjl]

nighthawkEP3 said:

Pinnacle Studio 8 for me

Thanks for the suggestions, I've just ordered the demo CD.

[nighthawkEP3]

hehehe, thats where I started

The web also shows a demo to give an insight of it's key features.

[Mad Dave]

The guy who does all our fundraising videos here uses Premiere and i understand hes rates it quite highly.

[srider]

Premiere is definately considered as the standard setter, but I quite like Vegas Video too. I'm not a video pro, but wanted something better than the £100ish stuff, and it's easily done everything I've ever needed http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/products/vegasfamily.asp

[kojak69]

I'm also using Pinnacle Studio 8 at the moment.

[meeja]

Edt said:

If you can stretch to Premiere, then do. It's FAB for DV work. Has got all the filters, effects, and shiny bits you'd ever want, and you can setup the interface to be as NASA or Noddy as you want. Ed

Premiere is probably one of the best for home PC/DV work.....

.... but if you get the chance to play with PROPER editing stuff, like Media 100, Avid, or SMOKE then take the opportunity..... immense fun can be had!

[viper_larry]

Would I be shot down for suggesting Microsoft Movie Maker v2? OK, so not a pro package, but I find it so easy to use it's hard to look at anything else. I have Premier, but this is a bit complex for basic editing that I do.

MMM is a free download too off the MS site...

[Pierscoe1]

Quite Simply.. Premiere is the dogs danglies...

it does everything an AVID suite can do (albeit a bit slower)

[ErnestM]

viper_larry said:

Would I be shot down for suggesting Microsoft Movie Maker v2? OK, so not a pro package, but I find it so easy to use it's hard to look at anything else. I have Premier, but this is a bit complex for basic editing that I do. MMM is a free download too off the MS site...

The one saving grace of MM2 is the native widescreen capability. I sometimes use it just to capture my DV and then transfer the DV-AVI to the Premier computer.

The bad thing is no support for non-MS codecs. Even then, I find the MS-codec support marginal. You can get better encoding results using MS media encoder 9 (which is also free)...

ErnestM

[meeja]

Pierscoe1 said:

Quite Simply.. Premiere is the dogs danglies... it does everything an AVID suite can do (albeit a bit slower)

Erm, not quite......

But it can do a fair amount of the stuff that a standard Avid setup can do, but very, very slowly.

[FourWheelDrift]

I won't mention my Avid Xpress Pro then