Goodbye UVS: Ulead programmers please read!

petgray · Post by **petgray** » Mon Jul 23, 2007 11:58 am

Good morning Ulead

Om Friday I did some video editing on the MPEG-2 files produced by my Sony Mini-DVD camcorder. It should have taken me a couple of hours. In fact it took me a whole weekend, on and off, because after doing the edit, the audio and video were out of sync, and I spent a lot of time fiddling with it trying to find what I had done wrong (nothing, apparently), trying to find workarounds, reading the user forums for help etc. The result of my research was that this is not an isolated or new problem, it has persisted through several versions of UVS, and many people have opted to use a different video editor (eg Womble MPEG Video Wizard) to edit MPEG-2 video to avoid the problems created by UVS.

I have stuck with UVS from versions 7 through to 10, but my patience has finally run out so I am also migrating to Womble. But before I go I¡¦d like to give you some suggestions.

For UVS version 12 (or later), please will you attend to the basic functions before adding any more ¡§special features¡¨. I (and probably most other people) don¡¦t need a thousand transitions, filters and other gimmicks in my video editing program. I just need it to do basic cutting and splicing and adding titles, competently and without crashing or wrecking the video. And I need it to do this with MPEG-2 video, because that is what my Sony DVD camcorder produces, so that is what I have to work with, along with thousands of other people.

I¡¦ve heard it said that UVS does not do an adequate job of editing MPEG-2 video because this is a specialized function which needs a specialized program, but I don¡¦t accept this. Mini-DVD camcorders which produce MPEG-2 video are not specially imported from Mars for weird people. They are very common, tens of thousands of people buy them every year, and telling me that this is too specialized is rather like selling me a car with only three gears and telling me that the fourth gear is a specialized function, there¡¦s not much call for that round here, so you decided to leave it out. Any decent video editing program should either be able to perform basic editing functions on this type of video or should carry a prominent warning on the box ¡§do not buy this product if you have a mini-DVD camcorder¡¨.

This is not rocket science: it¡¦s basic, basic stuff. If Womble can do this and UVS can¡¦t, then guess who is going to get my $$$s when it¡¦s upgrade time. I don¡¦t have time to fiddle around looking for workarounds to problems and looking for help in user forums: I would rather pay $100 and get something which just does what it says on the box: edits video.

End of rant, and have a nice day.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Mon Jul 23, 2007 1:23 pm

Sorry, but there is probably little point in venting here. All of us helpers are volunteers, and none of us work for Corel or Ulead. Our only link is like yours -- we own the product. As far as we are aware, Corel/Ulead employees seldom if ever visit the board.

Personally, I am sorry you feel that way. I am one of the very lucky ones who have never had out of sync problems since I started using VS way back with version 7. And in fact, I had thought the problem had largely disappeared after VS9, and certainly VS10, had appeared on the market.

Anyway, good luck with your future endeavours.

petgray · Post by **petgray** » Mon Jul 23, 2007 2:19 pm

> As far as we are aware, Corel/Ulead employees seldom if ever visit the board.

Hmm - I wonder if that's part of the problem? That they don't listen to what their customers are saying? If I was a software manufacturer, I would be visiting boards like this. Seriously. I'm a doctor and I visit RateMDs.com to see what my patients are saying about me...

Sektionschef · Post by **Sektionschef** » Mon Jul 23, 2007 2:45 pm

Peter, if you have worked a lot with UVS and mpeg2 files, have you never run into THIS problem:
http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic. ... 946#122946
Regards
Sektionschef

duel · Post by **duel** » Mon Jul 23, 2007 10:39 pm

Ken Berry wrote:Sorry, but there is probably little point in venting here. All of us helpers are volunteers, and none of us work for Corel or Ulead. Our only link is like yours -- we own the product. As far as we are aware, Corel/Ulead employees seldom if ever visit the board.

With that said, let me thank you guys for taking the time to help us all out on here

Jerry Jones · Post by **Jerry Jones** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 9:51 pm

I don't know how the company operates now that it has been acquired by Corel, but back in the Ulead days I was employed full-time as a consultant and I would make a list of problems being reported to this forum and I would e-mail that list directly to headquarters in Taiwan and to the North American offices in Torrance.

I would -- on a weekly basis -- confer with Ulead's Torrance tech support staff supervisor.

And we did work through a significant number of confirmed bugs.

On the other hand, there were also issues being reported by some users that seemed to be unrelated to the software.

Ulead is not the same company that it was in 2003/2004; many key employees either quit or were terminated as a result of the fact the company has been acquired, not just once, but twice in the past three years!

So I suspect that the Ulead organization -- or what is left of it -- is just a shell of the former company and only now is Corel beginning to implement plans for the future and once again hire critical staff.

You can see announcements on the Corel Web site for a variety of new positions.

But this MPEG smart render bug is something we should have caught much sooner.

The reason I didn't catch it back in 2003 was due to the fact I was catching other bugs related to MPEG smart render... such as loss of audio/video synchronization in relation to certain types of DVD camcorder files (DVD-RAM-originated files).

In addition, the problem is not easy to see at first.

But once you see it, you can't "not" see it.

It's pretty bad and I'm wondering if it is something that Corel can fix or if it is something that MainConcept's engineers will have to fix.

But it basically negates the value of smart render for MPEGs.

You can achieve parity with other software by simply turning off smart render and then re-encoding every frame of an MPEG sequence.

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

petgray wrote:> As far as we are aware, Corel/Ulead employees seldom if ever visit the board.

Hmm - I wonder if that's part of the problem? That they don't listen to what their customers are saying? If I was a software manufacturer, I would be visiting boards like this. Seriously. I'm a doctor and I visit RateMDs.com to see what my patients are saying about me...

Jerry Jones · Post by **Jerry Jones** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 5:56 am

By the way, given the problems with MPEG smart rendering and loss of video/audio synchronization, I've given up on trying to natively edit MPEG files in the Corel applications.

So what is my solution?

I use a competing application to convert the DVD MPEG-2 files to DV .avi files.

Why do I use the competing application?

The quality of the encoding; it's absolutely better than the transcoding in the Corel programs.

After I finish transcoding to DV .avi, I then bring the transcoded DV .avi files into the Corel programs for editing.

This solves the loss of video/audio synchronization, the MPEG smart render glitches, and still preserves quality.

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

Sektionschef · Post by **Sektionschef** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 2:11 pm

Jerry Jones wrote:This solves the loss of video/audio synchronization, the MPEG smart render glitches, and still preserves quality.

Hi Jerry
How can your solution preserve the video quality?
Ok, you will not have a big quality loss when converting from mpeg2 to DV-avi but you defenitely WILL have a quality degrade when reencoding to mpeg2. Or do you leave your movies in DV-avi format?
I once made a test and converted my mpeg2 files to uncompressed(!) avi, which should be even better than DV-avi but the reencoding process(back to mpeg2) degraded the quality alot.
Even when using an external mpeg2 encoder(just used UVS as a frameserver and encoded using TMPGEnc) the quality was reduced alot.
Have you ever compared your source and target mpeg2 files in detail?
Regards
Sektionschef

Jerry Jones · Post by **Jerry Jones** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 5:34 pm

I preserve quality by doing the final render to DV .avi.

(Using the Corel applications and -- smart render -- which does work great for DV .avi files.)

Then I take this edited DV .avi file and I convert it to DVD-ready MPEG-2 using the MPEG encoder from the competing program.

I swear the quality of the MPEG encoding in the competing program is really that much better.

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

Sektionschef · Post by **Sektionschef** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 7:32 pm

Jerry Jones wrote: I swear the quality of the MPEG encoding in the competing program is really that much better.

Thanks!
So what competitor sw are you using? Is it your Pinnacle sw?
Regards
Sektionschef

Jerry Jones · Post by **Jerry Jones** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 7:53 pm

Yes.

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

Radioman62 · Post by **Radioman62** » Thu Aug 09, 2007 8:49 pm

Jerry Jones wrote: Then I take this edited DV .avi file and I convert it to DVD-ready MPEG-2 using the MPEG encoder from the competing program.

Then you loose your DD 5.1 audio. Maybe you never use that facility?

@Sektionschef
How do you frameserve? Do you use Debugmode free frameserver or something else?

robruiz · Post by **robruiz** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 6:15 am

goodbye! i hope that the future version(s) of ulead products will entice you to try it again...

Sektionschef · Post by **Sektionschef** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 6:29 am

Radioman62 wrote: @Sektionschef
How do you frameserve? Do you use Debugmode free frameserver or something else?

Yes, I use the free frameserver from Debugmode. Works great with UVS.
Regards
Sektionschef

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Fri Aug 24, 2007 12:33 pm

Radioman62 wrote:@Sektionschef
How do you frameserve?....

Be interesting if you can do a short "How to" if you have time.