Video Editing Software
on 09.19.05, 06:50am in media • comments (9)
Several months ago, I went ahead and picked up Adobe Premiere Elements. For the most part, I’ve been happy with it - the software is miles ahead of Windows Movie Maker and offers more features than what a novice video maker such as myself knows what to do with. However, it has some serious problems when it comes to codec support that really has me thinking about switching over to something else.
When working in Premiere Elements using AVI files, everything seems great - the program runs well and everything works as expected. However, if I try to work with a file that’s in some other format such as WMV, MOV, etc., it literally screeches to a halt, making editing almost impossible. I had to spend hours converting tons of Photostory created videos to AVI just to make a compilation I was making. Additionally, WMV and MP4 support (I bought the DiVX codecs, etc) is pretty weak through a ‘export’ menu that has to be manually configured, and is really buggy.
Every video professional I know really recommends Sony’s Vegas 6, but (frankly) its way more than what to spend for home movie editing. Has anyone played with it’s ‘light’ version, Vegas Movie Studio? Or does anyone have any recommendations on other Windows video editing software? Or do I just make the jump over to Final Cut Express HD on the Mac?
Nat (September 19, 2005 @ 9:03 am)
The light version of Vegas was recently updated and is now based on the Vegas 6 core, it might be interesting to look at it, you can compare the features here :
http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/products/showproduct.asp?PID=983&FeatureID=8363
Steve (September 19, 2005 @ 10:53 am)
Yeah, I saw that.. How is Vegas’s support for WMV?
Nat (September 19, 2005 @ 7:00 pm)
It fully supports Windows media files, you can encode HD video, multi-channel wmv/wma files, lossless wma files etc. So basically it supports all what Windows Media 9 series can offer.
It also fully supports quicktime, I often edit projects that were started on Imovie or FCP and it works very well.
For web projects I now use the Flash 8 encoder which is incredible, the quality is much higher than WMV or H.264 at smaller sizes than these codecs.
Steve (September 19, 2005 @ 8:32 pm)
I downloaded the trial version — after some minor tweaking of the WMV settings, I have to say I’m pretty impressed. I’ll probably be making a purchase pretty soon..
jmwatte (September 20, 2005 @ 1:06 pm)
I believe that avid has a light version…
haven’t cheked it out yet…
http://www.avid.com/freedv/
Nat (September 20, 2005 @ 3:31 pm)
Nice, if you need any help feel free to mail me, I’ve been using PocketFeed a lot so I can pay you back in some way
natcl[at]hotmail….
Steve (September 21, 2005 @ 3:03 pm)
Will do. Thanks!
Nameless One (November 22, 2005 @ 11:50 am)
When talking of video editing programs, I only recommend one, Magix’s Movie Edit Pro (~$70, but don’t be fooled by the price).
I do loads of video editing and run a multimedia blog (25thdimension.blogsome.com).
Clanless (May 10, 2006 @ 11:51 pm)
How can i convert a Vegas video file to Avi, mpeg, etc