Review of Video Studio 9 by a newbie (somewhat lengthy)

[temperpolk]

First of all, I should say that these are my conclusions after playing for a few of days with the VS9 trial version and tinkering with Cyberlink's Power Director 5 trial version.

My current goal was to capture straight from a DVD and compiling favourite clips of a TV series season and maintaining as much quality as possible in the edited product. So mostly I have used basic functions of VS9 such as capture, clip trimming with basic fade out fade in between scenes and adding menus.

I am extremely impressed with VS9. It works beautifully with my system (see profile). My fourth attempt at burning my current project produced an amazing result. The output quality is almost undistinguishable from the original. There have to be compromises of course to achieve that high quality. I restrict the edited video file length to no more than 40 minutes per DVD.

I have to say that the resources provided by this board are invaluable. Expert members always ready to answer any question, no matter how dumb, should be praised to no end. For someone who avoids manuals at all costs, like yours truly, this board has been a life saver.

After playing around for a couple of days with VS9, I was getting okay quality, but having some frustration with aspect ratio and smooth transitions. Then I started hunting the board for answers to my problems and found a ton of info and then played around some more until I got the results that I got last night.

For the type of project I was doing, as explained above, I got the best quality by capturing from DVD a chapter at a time in mpeg then editing and saving project - making sure to set project settings to the recommended as in the first sticky post [AVOID PROBLEMS...]

Then, I went AGAINST recommendation and after adding menus and all that stuff, choosing the create disc option without saving the file to any format. Basically I burnt the DVD using the VS9 project file.

It burnt like a charm, taking approximately 1 hour. (remember that I am limiting my files to around 40 minutes per DVD). I know I am wasting a lot of DVD space but the quality makes it worth it to me. The result was stunning! No detectable difference in quality from the original.

Considering just basic functionality that I used here is the GREAT, SO-SO and IT SUCKS compared with other products I have been playing with as well:

GREAT:

- Great performance. Absolutely no system crashes or freezes experienced

- Capture from DVD. It reads the DVD menu great, so you know exactly which episode and which chapter you are importing (unlike Power Director 5 for instance). And most surprisingly of all, it is very fast in importing.

- Menu building - I like it a lot. Very user friendly and great effects

SO-SO

- Clip trimming – a lot of functionality, but a little frustrating, especially with the toggle bar in timeline view. I haven’t investigated yet if sensitivity can be changed.

- Scene detection – unless I’m doing something wrong, even when I reduce the sensitivity to 0 I still get way too many scenes. But I can live with it.

- Jumpy playback (especially sound) during preview – after VS9 project is saved, and it plays automatically. The problem doesn’t exist in the finished product.

IT SUCKS

- Nothing so far. I haven’t found anything yet that has frustrated me to the point I want to throw my laptop out the window. Then again, I emphasize that I have not tried projects from different mediums than DVD


So there you go. For now, VS9 for me has won over the other products I was testing. Mostly all my projects are going to be the type I described and this product seems to fit my needs for now.

I’m sure I’ll be around a lot with many dumb questions so I apologize in advance and beg your patience.

Cheers!

[Black Lab]

Glad to hear you've had a good experience. As you can see most posts are because of problems or complaints. It is refreshing to hear someone else enjoying VideoStudio.

[DVDDoug]

The output quality is almost undistinguishable from the original.

That's the great thing about digital. A copy can be identical to the original... You can make a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, etc, and they will all be identical.

If you re-code amn MPEG file, or process it (such as adjusting the color) you will get some degradation of quality. Even if you are re-coding your videos to a higher bitrate so that a 40 minute video fills-up a DVD, you might be degrading the quality! If you must re-code for another reason, a higher bitrate will mean less degradation with the 2nd encode.

In fact, MPEGs are not meant to be edited. And, I bought a special-purpose MPEG editor to get-around the 'lip-sync" problems, but this does not solve the inherent decode / re-code degradation.

There is some quality lost in the analog-to-digital conversion and in the digital-to-analog conversion when it's played-back. And, MPEG-2 is more "lossy" than some other formats. So, I'm not saying that digital is perfect, but while it's in digital form you can make exact copies.

The same is true of MP3s. There is loss when converting to the MP3 format, but no matter how many generations of that MP3 are made, they will all be identical.

[maddrummer3301]

temperpolk,

Nice write up.

Editing tip:
You have been editing and working with the compressed format Mpeg2.
It's great that's working for you.

If you are having problems with transisitons etc your better off doing
them in the DV format.

DV is true frame by frame editing.
Mpeg2 is first de-compressed, calculated, then re-compressed.

You can export a small Mpeg2 clip to DV-Type1 for better editing.
The file will be about 5 times bigger.
First export the small clip to DV-Type1 and them re-import the new dv.avi file. Perform the editing and export it to mpeg2 to the same
properties it was originally created at. Complex transisions and overlays will be much smoother.

Hope this helps,

MD