Hiyas. Me and my chaps have ourselves some spiffy video footage (for a movie entitled Attack Of The Überpimps: A Dance Extravaganza… :D). So far, we’ve been using Adobe Premiere 5.1 for all our editing needs… but when we upgraded to Firewire and Premiere 6.0, things started going sour (choppy framerates in the editing screen, for example, and poor audio).
So, anyway, are there any other programs out there that won’t suffer from such flaws? Or any method of fixing the Premiere 6.0 glitches?
(Note: First person to say “Get a Mac” will get five across the eyes… of course, now I’ve guaranteed that someone will say it, and it’ll probably be Fenris…)
Admittedly I’m more of an Audio guy than video but I’ve been dabbling lately.
From what I can tell the soloution thats becoming sort of a home studio standard for PC video work is Vegas Video , by Sonic Foundry. you can download a trial version from sonicfoundry.com, thats good for 30 days or something. I just bought the full version, couple hundred bucks and its really solid. can’t speak to the demo, but i imagine it will get the job done. I do know it will let you save, i think it just lacks some effects and expires.
Its a clean intuitive interface and since Sonic Foundry was originally just an audio software company, the audio tools are really solid and easy to use, and the quality is good.
The ‘choppy framerates’ may just be the DV playback on the desktop – it’s intentionally choppy because you’re supposed to look at the output from the DV camera. Could this be what you’re describing?
More memory, a good DV capture card (especially a RealTime one) like Canopus or Pinnacle, one that is designed to dovetail into Premiere, will solve all your troubles.
Well, I ain’t Fenris, but the short truth is that on the non-pro level, video editing on a Windows PC just won’t be as clean or as easy as anything you can do on a Mac. Blame it on the better software/hardware integration, blame it on Apple’s amazing iMovie software, but doing home video in Windows is like doing plumbing with a hammer – you can make it work, but it won’t be pretty.
You may want to read this article from ZDNet’s David Coursey for a Windows’ user’s POV.
rjung: the Macs do indeed do a good job on DV integration. But your comments are off-topic, please read the OP.
** GuanoLad** The canopus folk I’ve talked to are fervent about how they love thier hardware. Some Pinnacle folks as well.
That having been said: nonsense! You can run Premiere 6 on any generic’ firewire PC connection. The third-party stuff gives you more abilities, but for basic video-editing expensive upgrade hardware is NOT a requirement.
SPOOFE: have you lost interest in this topic? Do you want to get new hardware, software, fix Premiere, …?
I am stressing myself over buying a new pc that I want to have for a home office as well as video editing. Way too many choices, configurations, and such.
Not really. I’ve run Premiere 6.0 on Win98SE, Athlon 1.3 Gig w/512 Ram and a cheap TNT Riva card. Everything ran perfect. The DV captures worked without fail from the Sony camera into a cheap firewire card. Out of 30+ minutes of captures I didn’t lose one frame.
The editing was smooth and perfect. I used lots of FX and the render time was minimal (I didn’t feel like I had to leave the computer while it thought about it).
The system never locked or acted funny. The software never crashed. Nothing was chunky or “not pretty”.
I use the same system for doing digital audio editing and I never have a problem with that either.
It might get ugly if someone runs a Windows machine on one of those crap Dell or Gateway computers, but a system with a good motherboard/memory/cpu with all the proper drivers will have no problems.
Anyhoo, we do have a Pinnacle DV capture card, and we’re pretty sure that it ain’t the problem. The “choppy video” is in both the preview window and the actual editing window… when trying to edit different clips, it’ll show maybe one frame per second, or less. The “choppy audio” has the audio cutting in and out, allowing you to hear maybe a quarter of what was actually recorded.
The choppy audio and video make editing damn near impossible, as our work calls for very precise editing of both.
And Rjung… you’re just plain wrong, bucko. Before we tried to upgrade (when we were editing from an S-Video connection, and on Adobe 5.1), everything ran smoothly. The problems arose when we “upgraded” the system and software… and now we can’t go back to how we had it before. The lack of memory may be a problem… the system has only 128 megabytes of PC-133 RAM. We’re planning on throwing another 256-mb into it… think that’ll improve things?
Bad Hat… we’ll check out Vegas Video. Maybe it can serve as a temporary editing platform in the meantime.
I don’t think it’s the RAM. It sounds like it’s some basic problem with the 1394 connection to the camera. I’d just bag that Pinnacle card and get the most utterly generic firewire card you can. They’re about $70 or less online.
Here’s a popular one, ADS PYRO, found for $69 at J&R. You can probably shop around and knock $10 to $20 bucks off the price for that or a similar card.
Here’s a really generic one for $25! although I don’t vouch for it; I’ve actually used the PYRO and it works like a champ.
(BTW, you’re SURE you’re looking at the output from the DV camera, not from the desktop?)
Oh, the ultimate output, when viewed in, say, Windows Media Player (and on the camera itself) is fine. That’s why I know it’s not a problem with the DV capture card. The problem is that the footage, when editing, is so choppy that accurate and precise editing is impossible. I was just looking for ways to fix that (since that error didn’t pop up with S-video footage or Adobe 5.1), and checking if other programs could solve that problem.
But that doesn’t prove that it’s not the DV card at all. The DV card is used for capture and playback inside of Premiere. So all that’s proven is that the card is doing half of its job correctly.
That’s why I’m asking: are you looking at the playback output on the DV camera when editing because it may be fine there.
You say that the ‘ultimate output’ when viewed on the DV camera is fine. OK, how is it getting there? Media Player won’t play to firewire, so we’re missing a step here.
Like I wrote, I’m just subbing for Fenris here. I can’t help it, but the OP reads like “What brand of Budweiser should I drink for the ultimate beer-lover’s experience?”
rjung, it’s tiresome, let’s move on from Mac-isms. I’ve used Macs since 1985, Windows since 1989. They’re much the same, there’s much to laud or complain about on either, and on both the devil is always in the details.
In order to use DV capture your computer HD must be capable of meeting their insane sustained capture rates. Also, for large files, you need a NTSF file system.
So, I just use a ATI $50 video card with s-video In/Out, comes with software to capture in Mpeg1/Mpeg2. Then I edit & write a VCD to a cdrom with Nero. I use a s-video Sony High 8 camcorder. I can get about one hour of Mpeg1 on a vcd & use Windows Me. Works great for me & saves a ton of money. The capture-to-vcd–write-completion time is only ten minutes more than the length of the video itself.
Since I’m doing this professionally now, I have a couple recommendations especially if you’ll be working in DV rather than analog-to-DV. For low end, Sonic Foundries “Video Factory”. For mid-range/professional, Sonic Foundry’s “Vegas Video”. We’ve had the opportunity to try most everything, and while some people swear by Premier (which is good), I personally like the interface to Vegas much better. In addition to multitrack video, you can multitrack audio. Thus Vegas becomes Premiere and Digidesigns “Pro Tools” all rolled into one, at a pretty good price (I picked Vegas 2.0 up at Best Buy last year for $149, and upgrade for another $149). Plus Vegas integrates with Sonic Foundry’s “Sound Forge”, my preferred audio editor. Combine all this with Sonic’s “Acid” and you can build almost any sound track you want for your multicamera video masterpiece!
I was not please with the Ulead stuff at all. Pinnacle is supposed to be good, but from what I’ve seen of the interface I still prefer Vegas.
If you are sampling analog to DV you do need a fast drive system, as Handy mentioned. I’ve used ATA66, ATA100, and IDE RAID, and by far I strongly recommend use IDE RAID as a RAID 0 stripe set. Since it’s hardware RAID it’s completely transparent to the OS so you can use it on Win98SE and ME. ATA66 is useless, and ATA100 is barely passable even with a high RPM drive, but a dual drive IDE RAID system kicks ass! Throughput tests delivered 3 times the performance on two 5400RPM drives than ATA100 with a 7200RPM drive.
Also, upgrade to Windows XP. It’s much more stable, plus you can get around the 4GB file size limit of Win9x.
but the short truth is that on the non-pro level, video editing on a Windows PC just won’t be as clean or as easy as anything you can do on a Mac. Blame it on the better software/hardware integration, blame it on Apple’s amazing iMovie software, but doing home video in Windows is like doing plumbing with a hammer – you can make it work, but it won’t be pretty.