VideoStudio 8se dvd - inefficient editing

[nonkertomph]

Hello

I have Ulead Video Studio 8 SE-DVD, which came bundled with
a TV capture card, Fusion HDTV by DVico.

I can open movies captured with this card saved as mpeg/mpeg 2 etc...

I have been trying to merge an mpeg 2 movie captured with the DVico card with an edited audio file extracted from the same movie.

Now, it is intended to swap this edited audio with the origional audio track.

So far I have been able to achieve this BUT....

Video Studio 8 se is incredibly inefficient to work with.

After importing the video file in question all is well but at the next step, being importing the desired audio file to replace the origional with leaves a lot to be desired.

1 - Importing an audio track to the audio lane in the editor (and removing the audio from the video file with the 'split audio' command) causes the cpu usage to play back to project to go from 30% to 100% a per the windows Task Manager. (3ghz intel cpu here).
This is an obscenely inefficient predicament to be in when all you want to do is add/swap the audio for a video file. (16 bit 44.1 khz)
Windows Movie Maker is more efficient in this regard!

2 - 'Share' mixing down the new interleaved file to any format other than the 'project setting' is just appauling in terms of the time it takes to actually do and the CPU utilisation to do it.

Now, if one choses .AVI as the destination format, an Mpeg 2 file no larger than 720 megs ended up as a 12 gigabyte file that never finished rendering and clogged up my C drive (had neglected to specify one of my larger non-system disks), this is just stupid, why does a software need to create a 12 gig file from a previously smaller than 1gb file just to render it to another format?

I am currently waiting on the mixdown of the afformentioned file to the .WMV format, its taking a rediculously long time and my CPU is maxed at 100% constantly.

I am running from the CD version, that is I have not yet tried installing the available update, but I dont hold much hope if the performance of VS8 se is anything to go by.

And I am so sick of having to stare at the 'Pretty Brunette' on the startup
of this software every time it loads, what was it they say about corporations that use pretty girls to sell ther stuff?

Pretty disapointed here, Ulead is now in the 'Dodgy' category of my mind when I think video software.

[sjj1805]

nonkertomph

Now, if one choses .AVI as the destination format, an Mpeg 2 file no larger than 720 megs ended up as a 12 gigabyte file that never finished rendering and clogged up my C drive (had neglected to specify one of my larger non-system disks), this is just stupid, why does a software need to create a 12 gig file from a previously smaller than 1gb file just to render it to another format?

Why are you doing this?
You should capture and edit in AVI and then render to MPEG not the other way round.

Think of it this way. Compare a video to its still image counterpart
MPEG = JPG
AVI = BMP

[2Dogs]

Hi nonkertomph,

there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to use VS8SE DVD successfully with your pc. You will need to make some effort to learn how to use the program, however, and many people (me included) find much of it somewhat counter-intuitive.

A good start would be the manual - but before you try to do any editing, first read the "sticky' at the top of this forum. Although doing things exactly as per the manual might work, the "recommended procedure" described in the sticky will help you avoid most common problems.

Having said that, to achieve what you seem to be attempting to do, I would simply mute the audio on the video clip rather than splitting it, and add the audio track in one of the audio overlay tracks.

From what you've described, it would appear that you generated an uncompressed AVI file. It's a very effective way of filling a hard drive, as you discovered! As sjj1805 said, no point in exporting to AVI from MPEG-2. You should use the "Share" >> "Create Video File" step to render the project to an MPEG-2 file. If you select that to have the same properties as your original clip, it should enable "Smart Render", and with your setup, might render the file in as little as 1/15 of the run time of the video clip, depending on how much RAM you have. That doesn't sound too incredibly inefficient to me.

Welcome to the forum!

[Ken Berry]

You may also be acting under a misapprehension about exactly what an .avi file is because you have seen downloaded movies in .avi format which are quite small and will indeed fit on a CD, rather than a DVD. I assume that may have been why you chose to try to convert to .avi in the first place.

But the reality is that .avi is merely a carrier format for a variety of other formats, and the ones I just mentioned are usually mpeg-4s of the DivX or XVid varieties -- hence their small size. But a fully uncompressed .avi -- which it does sound as though you have inadvertently selected -- is truly huge, and generally runs out at about 65GB per hour. The DV version of AVI is 'much' smaller, but still runs at around 13 GB per hour.

As for rendering into WMV format, if you do a search of this Board using WMV as the key word, you will see that most such renders take an incredible amount of time, and verrrrry much longer than a render out to a final mpeg-2 file. And a lot of them are not particularly successful either.

You never said what you intended to do with your video, but if you intend to burn it to DVD, then you need to retain it in DVD-compliant mpeg-2 format in any case. That is to say, you do unless you happen to have one of the handful of stand-alone players which will play mpeg-4 DVDs, and you realise that very few other people will be able to play them in that format...