Idiots Guide to Ulead Video

Charli · Post by **Charli** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 6:59 pm

Hi there.

I'm so sorry to be one of those newbies that is completely oblivious to the video editing world and annoys people with questions but I am in desperate need of help.

I have been working with WMM for a while now and found it pretty easy to use but very basic with its capabilities. For my birthday I was brought Puremotion Edit Studio 5 and my laptop computer could NOT handle it. It was incredibly slow and it was taking an age to achieve anything.

Recently in desperation I brought yet another video editing programme this time Ulead Video Studio 11. The man in the shop told me it shouldn't be a problem to use as my computer is only 6 months old and has at least 20 GB spare but I am desperately unhappy to find the exact same problem. I'm sure it must be something to do with my computer, but have no idea where to start rectifying it. I have searched for beginners guides to vid editing and NOTHING has helped.

Please can anyone help me.

My laptop is a Sony Vaio and I use XP. If there's anyone who can tell me how to start going about video editing and if laptops are even capable please can you let me know.

It's driving me insane. I use avi files and never capture anything from a camera as they are all files I already have on my comp. The avi files are usually around 300 mb in length. It's taking a ridiculously long amount of time to edit anything.

I never had a problem with moviemaker and found it easy but this is just horrifically hard.

Please please help a desperate young woman indeed.

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 7:10 pm

You haven't told us anything about the problems you are having or the equipment you are using. Please read and following the announcement at the top of this forum. The one that says PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE POSTING.

Have you taken a look at the Video Product Tutorials? I would start there, with particular interest to the Suggested Workflow.

The man in the shop told me it shouldn't be a problem to use as my computer is only 6 months old and has at least 20 GB spare

I don't know who the man in the shop is but he apparently doesn't know a whole lot about video editing since an hours worth of DV-AVI is about 13GB!

Please post the info requested in the top announcement and we'll see what we can do.

Charli · Post by **Charli** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 7:59 pm

Thankyou Blacklab. My apologies for not placing my problem like that. "The man in the shop" was a Computer salesman who quite clearly now should not have been given the job if he didn't know what he was talking about.

SUBJECT: Extremely slow process of editing clips.

Nature of the problem: Avi files are impossible to work with.

Properties of your source files (format, file size, where did you get it?) : They are all avi files, 350 mb and most are downloaded films or television.

What devices are involved and their mode of connection?
I have a Sony Vaio. I don't use a tv capture card or any video cameras or outside sources besides my laptop.

Project Settings: I can't even make a project at this point.

Output format (file, DVD, VCD, SVCD)
WMV

PAL or NTSC: NTSC

Error Codes (if any)

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 8:10 pm

Charli wrote:Thankyou Blacklab. My apologies for not placing my problem like that. "The man in the shop" was a Computer salesman who quite clearly now should not have been given the job if he didn't know what he was talking about.

SUBJECT: Extremely slow process of editing clips.

Nature of the problem: Avi files are impossible to work with.
Avi files can be all sorts, but I'm surmising they are the highly compressed type such as DivX (see below).

Properties of your source files (format, file size, where did you get it?) : They are all avi files, 350 mb and most are downloaded films or television.
Since you say they are downloaded leads me to believe they are DivX, Xvid, or the like. These are highly compressed files mainly for viewing, not editing.

What devices are involved and their mode of connection?
I have a Sony Vaio. I don't use a tv capture card or any video cameras or outside sources besides my laptop.

Project Settings: I can't even make a project at this point.
If you put clips on the timeline, then you have a project. Go to File > Project Properties and list them here.

Output format (file, DVD, VCD, SVCD)
WMV
So you are then uploading them to the Internet?

PAL or NTSC: NTSC

Error Codes (if any)

Jerry Jones · Post by **Jerry Jones** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 8:28 pm

If you've "downloaded" your .avi files, they could be anything.

I would guess they're long GOP files and not I-FRAME codec files.

DV .AVI files from tape-based "MiniDV" consumer camcorders, for example, are I-FRAME files.

I-FRAME files are "edit-friendly."

Long GOP files are not "edit friendly."

If you were to transcode your files to an I-FRAME format, you would likely encounter greater ease of editing.

Knowing the properties of your source files can be helpful.

To determine your properties, insert a clip into your Corel VideoStudio timeline.

Right-mouse click on the clip.

A pop-up menu should appear.

Click "Properties."

Then write down the properties for your source file.

Report back to us.

DV .avi files that I use, for example, have the following list of properties:

* NTSC drop frame (29.97 fps)
* Microsoft AVI files
* 24 bits, 720 x 480, 4:3, 29.97 fps
* Lower Field First
* DV Video Encoder -- type 1
* DV Audio -- NTSC, 48.000 kHz, 16 Bit, Stereo

Your files should have a similar list of properties.

If you can report those properties to us we can then know how you should be doing to make your editing experience easier.

Thanks,

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

Post by **Ken Berry** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 9:51 pm

And if, as we all suspect, you are indeed working with DivX or XVid files (which use the .avi extension), and outputting to WMV, the latter alone is a cause for extremely long processing times. WMV is a format specially developed by Microsoft as a 'competitor' if you will, to DivX and XVid, and other highly compressed mpeg-4 formats. It uses its own proprietary algorithms and, in practice, a lot of users have had difficulty with it: extremely long processing times is but one of the problems.

On the other hand, using Windows Movie Maker with that format is quick because WMM is of course the Microsoft editing program, specifically designed to work with .wmv files (and DV/AVI files; plus .asf files, which are a high quality version of .wmv).

As BlackLab already intimated, having 20 GB of spare space on your computer's hard disk is not all that much when you are talking about video editing. At the very least, you should think about either replacing the Vaio's hard disk with a larger one or at least buying an external hard disk drive with at least 120 GB (and preferably more) space on it. My personal recommendation would be an external case which uses USB 2.0, but you might also consider a Firewire one since I think your Vaio has a mini Firewire port.

And speaking of Vaios, can you tell us exactly which model it is, and what other resources it has apart from 20 GB of free space. Do you know, for instance, how much RAM it has, and what its graphics card and motherboard are? Having insufficient computer resources can be another contributing factor to slow processing times.

Charli · Post by **Charli** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 10:27 pm

Thanks so much for all your comments, I'm off to do what you all suggested and report back with more information. Thankyou for taking the time to help me figure this out.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 3:31 am

Charli
As a new user of video editing products a lot of this probably went straight over your head. I-frames long GOP's and so on so I shall try and explain it a bit easier for you.

Raw Video is huge and uses something like 65 Gigabytes of Hard Drive space for a hours worth of video. Obviously this would be very difficult to work with and requires a large hard drive. Your computer, no matter how powerful would struggle to move these vast amounts of data about.

The boffins came up with methods of making these video files smaller.
They used various ways of COmpressing video and then later DECompressing it again. This is where the term CODEC is derived.

Video Editing programs work quite happily with a form of CODEC known as DV (Digital Video) which uses about 13 Gigabytes per hour. This is not such a strain on your computer and obviously requires less hard drive space.

If you are making a DVD - like the ones you buy in the shops then the video will be in a form using a CODEC known as MPEG. (Motion Picture Experts Group) in the early days this was MPEG1 and was quite small and with a quality similar to VHS tapes. you could get between 60-80 minutes worth of video on a standard CD. This was followed by MPEG2 which is the format most used to create DVD. (They can also use MPEG1) MPEG2 is less compressed than MPEG1 and the quality is far superior.

In recent years a very highly compressed format has been developed that has a quality similar to MPEG2 but the file size is about 700 Megabytes per hour. This format makes it ideal for sharing video on the internet and is widely used by Television Companies who are now placing their programs on the internet for download. This format is termed MPEG4.
There are also 2 other formats very similar to MPEG4 and these are DivX and also Xvid.

Whilst these MPEG4 DivX and Xvid formats are excellent, they are also very difficult to edit. They are meant for viewing not editing. for this reason it is normally better to decompress them to another less compressed format. Whilst I normally recommend that Video Editing is carried out where possible in DV format, when converting MPEG4 DivX or Xvid to another format for editing then here I suggest that you convert to MPEG2.

The reason for this is that ultimately - if you are going to create a DVD then it will have to be converted to MPEG2 anyway. To keep conversions from one format to another to a minimum it makes sense to use the MPEG2 format.

MPEG2 is not so easy to edit as DV and is susceptible to audio/video synchronisation problems - i.e. where you see someones mouth move but the words come out a second or so before/after the lip movement.
From my experience this lack of synchronisation is normally found where transitions have been inserted between clips. To help prevent this I suggest that you do not use transitions but stick to straight cuts - in other words but end the clips.

I hope this makes things a bit more clear.

Charli · Post by **Charli** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 5:34 pm

Hi all.

I decided to heed all your advice and purchased myself an external hard-drive precisely for video editing, it is 400gb so should leave me plenty of space to work with and it has not made editing any easier at all so i'm inclined to believe it's a codec issue.

I right clicked and propertied the file I was working on and it gave me these properties...

file format: microsoft avi files
file size: 16,871 kb
frame rate: 30.000 frames/sec
duration: 88.967 seconds
data rate: 187.44 kpbs

video compression: divx decoder filter
attributes: 24 bits 640x480
total frames: 2669 frame

audio compression: mpeg audio layer2

My computer is a Sony Vaio VGN-FE series and has 1.00 GBZ of RAM, it has a T2300 @ 1.66ghz processor.

I'm hoping this might explain to any of you why it's so slow to edit or process anything.

sjj1805 thank you for your information about codecs it helped me understand a great deal more.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Sun Jul 22, 2007 12:37 am

The external hard drive will still be incredibly useful to you as 20 GB on the Vaio is just not enough, really, for editing video.

Your central problem is, as we surmised earlier, the fact that you are using video encoded using DivX. I suppose we can assume you have some version of the DivX codec on the computer -- otherwise VS would simply have refused to handle the videos, even slowly, if there were no DivX codec there.

But as we have already explained, DivX is a highly compressed mpeg-4-like format meant primarily for display, and difficult (and slow) to edit and re-render into a form usable for a standard video DVD. And that format is mpeg-2. Heck, even the frame size used by DivX (640 x 480) is not DVD compatible... And if, as you indicated in one msg above, you are converting them to WMV format, then as I said at that time, converting *any* format to .wmv is an incredibly slow process in its own right in VS.

So the first trick is to convert the DivX into mpeg-2. Now you can use VS for that, but as you have discovered, that is a very slow process which can raise other problems. There are specialised programs out there specifically designed to convert DivX to mpeg-2. One of them which springs to mind is DivX2DVD, but I am pretty sure that is a commercial program, and so you have to pay for it. (The fact that specialised programs have been developed for this is itself indicative that using DivX for other purposes is not a simple matter.

) Womble is a specialised mpeg-2 editor, and as far as I am aware, does not convert DivX to mpeg-2. (It well may, and someone will soon tell us if it does!

But I simply don't know...

)

There is a free conversion program out there called SUPER which can do the job, and do so relatively quickly too. So I would download that and try it out. http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

One of your other problems is going to be, though, the end quality of your final video/DVD. Converting from a highly compressed format like DivX to a less compressed one is going to entail a probably noticeable loss in quality. But there is little you can do about that except keep the properties of the mpeg-2 you are converting to, high quality -- especially the bitrate. The higher the bitrate, the higher the quality (though the less you can fit on a DVD...)

One option you might want to consider, if you intend only to view these files on your own TV and are in the market for a new DVD player, would be to buy a player which is rated to play DivX movies. There are quite a lot on the market these days. It will be marked on the box and on the player itself. That way, you can simply download your DivX files and burn them to a CD (or quite a few to a DVD), really as archives, and put them in the DVD player which will recognise the format and happily play them at their original quality (which can be quite good indeed). For example, I have an LG which does this.

Charli · Post by **Charli** » Sun Jul 22, 2007 12:51 am

Thanks very much Ken, I am downloading Super as I type.

If I intend to share my finished movie on the internet rather than dvd, what bitrate do you recommend I set it to?

Post by **Ken Berry** » Sun Jul 22, 2007 1:15 am

I'm sorry -- I can't really answer that as I don't share my video over the internet. So I hope someone who knows something will jump in here.

What I do know is that it depends on where and how you intend sharing on the internet. Some sites, such as MySpace and Veoh publish their own rules for what format they want, and this would give you a pointer.

DivX itself is also meant to be a format which, because of its relatively small size yet high quality, is tailor made for transferring over the internet -- though of course is too large for the sites I mentioned above (I am pretty sure).

Ditto with .wmv which Microsoft developed specifically to compete with some of these other highly compressed formats.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Sun Jul 22, 2007 3:29 am

To share you movies on the internet one of the best formats is in fact DivX. There is a guide here for using the DivX codec with VideoStudio for this purpose.

Making and sharing VideoStudio Movie Templates

Charli · Post by **Charli** » Sun Jul 22, 2007 10:06 pm

I am just writing with an update to say thanks so much to Ken and all you guys. I used the super programme to change my divx files to mpg2 and they are working so much faster it's unbelievable. THANKYOU!

GuyL · Post by **GuyL** » Mon Jul 23, 2007 2:06 pm

Charli,

Are you embedding your video or putting it up for download?