I'm still pondering on this.. anyone care to comment?

-- Huong Chia Hiang (huongch@bigfoot.com), March 09, 2000

Answers

ULead Video Studio 4 (ULVS4)is a remarkably well-behaved Win98 entry- level video editing application. For its $100 cost I was able to edit my MJPEG-coded AVIs without fuss. It has one video/still track, and two audio tracks (actually three if you count the audio of your AVI), dozens of transition effects, and a title track. You can input just about any AVI whose codec is already installed on your PC, as well as still BMP and JPG files, and audio WAV files. It can output VCD- compliant MPEG files if you so choose to render your timeline contents that way. The MPEG encoding engine is that of Ligos LSX; I rarely render to an MPEG file, though, because there are none of the controls that can make you tweak your video to produce superb results like there is with the stand-alone version of LSX. So I just render back to the native format of the AVIs I have captured and encode the clip whole later with, say, Panasonic. ULVS4 fully supports all aspects of DV capturing and editing, and can also capture and encode to MPEG-2. The only thing I don't like much is the kitschily silly looking graphic interface, but this was probably thought of so that people new to NLE will not be put off by the spare looks of, say, Adobe Premiere, which costs much, much more (very little comparison here), but is perhaps the next step when you outgrow ULVS4.

-- EMartinez (epmartinez@yahoo.com), March 11, 2000.

The ADS Pyro 1394 firewire card is packaged with Video Studio 3 but if you ask you actually get VS4 and the VE version of the Media Studio 6 all for $100. MS6 is currently the best way to go unless someone knows if premiere 5.5 gives similar options.

The firewire card is by far the best option available today if you have a DV camera, it lets you make VCD's at an extremely good cost ratio and of very high quality. Who else out there is providing access to a home brew VCD for $100 in total + burning software. If your selective in the purchase of the camera you will also be able to direct capture analogue with the camera as the converter, some system for the price.

Although we asked for our update disks a month or so ago no one seems to know where Australia is on this planet as they are yet to arrive from ADS and therefore the comments must only be general at this point.

Its interesting that Canopus (DVRaptor fame) are getting into the act as well with a new 1394 related system release.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), March 12, 2000.

EMartinez, Hi

We all want to end up with a VCD of some sort so what do you think of the vcd mpeg-1 encoder in VS4 - LSX engine????

The same encoder is supplied with Media Studio 6VE - we got our disks from ADS yesterday.

I thought it was poor compared to Panasonic or bbMPEG. If this is the best LSX can do then there is little hope for anyone using avi's as source material and expecting results from the easy to use plugin encoders for an editing application!

Actually I am leaving VS on my system for two reasons:

1) excellent, user freindly capability to record CD's to the hard drive, more user friendly than my sound card (Turtle Beach Montego II) software.

2) It will accept DV type 2 avi's and re render them to a type 1 should I need it for a tape output - MS6ve does not want to live with the DV type2 codec installed on the system and no standalone mpeg encoder will currently accept a DV type1 avi input.

I am yet to test it for capturing Mpegs but I suspect one would have to do what the Dazzle based people seem to do, re encode in the Panasonic to get better quality.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), March 14, 2000.