Which Corel Software is the correct one for me.

[David Feldmar]

I was using Pinnacle Studio Plus 10.8 for the past 4 years for all my DVD presentations. With a new Casio camera Z750 which allows me to do both video and stills within the same cameras and save the inputs to a 4gb chip I found that the video portion is being save as a "mov" file which Pinnacle doesn't support. Since my camera does Hi-Def 16x9 capture I didn't want to convert to "avi" formats so I went to Ulead Video Studio 11. It;s been a new learning experience. Is this the best software to use? I have 24gb's of video from Europe and I want to make dvd video's with both text, music insertion, and have some freedoms. I see Corel has a whole list of different software, so which is the best recommended? I want these presentation to run on large screens in either 720P or 1080P formats, 16x9.

[Ken Berry]

This is just a quick interim answer to hold you over till our high def expert etech comes on line. Your camera shoots in the avchd format. VS11 can handle that, but you will need a relatively powerful computer (Core 2 Duo and above) to play back the edited video properly. You don't really give details on your System button as to what AMD processor you have etc.

I know that etech thinks that Movie Factory does a better (and easier) job of processing avchd, but hopefully he will speak for himself on this.

Either way, you will still need a good computer to play the avchd files back in that format.

[sjj1805]

The procedure with Standard Definition and High Definition is the same.
The main difference between the two is that with High Definition you use larger screen sizes and higher bit rates.

VideoStudio is the best program to select if you intend to do more than very simple editing. By this I mean that you intend to cut bits out, join clips together with or without transitions, add titles, add extra music &/or sound effects. Use Picture in Picture effects or split screens.

MovieFactory will allow some basic editing but it is essentially a DVD Authoring program.

You can use either VideoStudio or MovieFactory to author a DVD (After editing) but MovieFactory has a few extra things not found in VideoStudio though you would probably have to search quite hard to find them.

Some users have both and edit with VideoStudio then author with MovieFactory.

Some users simply want to get their video off their camcorder and onto a DVD disc with as little fuss as possible - these users would find MovieFactory more suited to their needs.

[David Feldmar]

While I have your attention maybe you can also explain an easier way to control my music when there is voice being used in description. The rubber band effect cause me to much problems trying to control the voice and the music. I did a 30 minute video of Normandy at the American Cemetery. By walking through the grounds as I approached each of the crosses or stars I voice the names of the WW2 men and women, where they came from, and the units they served. In between these voices I have music in the background, and the bands look like yo yo's. It took me quite a bit of time to complete this. Any tidbits of shortcuts you have to offer would greatly be appreciated.

[sjj1805]

Most of the veterans of this forum use a FREE audio editor
Audacity.
This is a sound editor. You can export the soundtrack from your video editor as a WAV file. Open the file with Audacity and make powerful alterations, fades, cuts, mixes, clean out unwanted sounds, echoes and a variety of other useful edits. You can then save the cleaned up sound file and then import it back into your video editor.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

[etech6355]

The rubber band effect cause me to much problems trying to control the voice and the music.

I don't mind saying it's not the easiest method of working with audio.

I'd love to see those videos of Normandy.
.
But, because they are in the mov container with h264 video and your using a windows computer you need to buy the QuickTime Pro Software. Sounds like your camcorder is geared more for a Mac computer.
using QuickTime Pro will enable you to import the files & export them to an editable format that VS11+ can work with.
QuickTime Pro isn't expensive and you will need it. I'm pretty sure you can use QT-Pro to export the videos to standard mpeg2 and use those files in VS to create dvd's.

VS may also be able to read your videos using the QT-Pro codecs, but not sure how this would work, you may have to disable VS11+ mov codec.
I'll be buying QT-Pro this week, now that many others in my family have switched to Mac's.
Sorry I don't have much information on the Mov h264 container/format.
I will be working with it later this week after buying the Pro version for windows.

[David Feldmar]

To all who helped me with my questions, I thank you. I have been able to finish all my videos of our France tour, and the rolling text works fine. I have just one other question. How much power on the processor do I need so when I play my edited video back it doesn't drag through the video and music sections. It's hard to edit with this skipping and dragging, so all I have been doing is cutting a DVD, playing it on the large screen to find out where my problems are. The only way I have been able to control the music over my voice on my video track is to use the rubber band procedure, and it seems if I keep the music at between -19 and -21 the voice and sound are ok.

My current system is a MSI MS-7253 motherboard, with a bus of 200mhz, 2gb of memory, a 2.6ghz AMD64, 128k pri mem cache, and 512k sec mem cache. For my video card its a ASUS Video3D.

What would your suggestions be for a processor to use Ulead and be able to play and edit a 30 minute video production with voice and music and not have to contend with this dragging situation.

For those of you who would like a copy of my Normandy presentation, I hope to put it on a server so that you can access it witha URL pointer.

usn_vet