Audio bugs/annoyances

[CodeLurker]

First the good news: I've spent some time reviewing freeware video editors, and for me, they all suck. I have a studio quality Firewire audio device, and I am not getting stable audio playback, or else no comprehensible workflow, from any of the Linux ones. I want to be able to drop in photos, video and music, and add titles with decent keyframing, and none of the free windows ones work well, or else have a comprehensible workflow. I tried Adobe Premiere Essentials, but didn't like that in order to put up my 44.1 kHz video on Youtube, I not only had to resample my video, but work in and deliver 48.1 kHz audio to YouTube, when YouTube doesn't do 48.1 kHz; but instead, 44.1. I downloaded the Sony Vegas Movie Studio demo, but it would not let me insert any photo except a GIF into the project. I posted a question asking about it, but got no response. Video Director has title effects, but no sophisticated keyframing, as far as I can see. As for VideoStudio Pro, it looks like it will do the job. It has sophisticated keyframing abilities, is using the media I want to use, and can work in and deliver to 44.1 kHz. It can output to H264/AAC at whatever framerate/format you need; which is the opposite of how they make Premiere Essentials such bad crippleware most people won't use it. VS is really cheap, too. It gives me hope, as I was a big WordPerfect supporter, but it stumbled badly when it made the transition to Windows. Its users seem to like it really well now. Maybe its time I gave it a try again, too (although poor importing may be yet slow the transition).

Now to the audio bugs/annoyances. I would be uninstalling VideoStudio and trying another, had there not been decent workarounds. I am trying the demo now. I am really pleased with what I see; but its handling of audio is weak. Since I am only trying the demo now, Corel doesn't let me report bugs; so I hope someone else can for me. I have a background in (audio) recording studio work, so this stuff stands out quickly, after having used more sophisticated audio applications. It appears Corel has improved the ULead product considerably already. Here are the problems I am having with it, and the workarounds:

1. If you have a video with audio, which has a transition from a title (or perhaps the Burger Bloom transition, which is what matches what I was able to do, but with glitchy sound in KDEnlive), the audio of the video clip is louder until it gets past the transition. That is wrong. WORKAROUND: I was able to split the audio from the video, and get constant volume for my clip during the transition.

2. If you have two video clips that overlap due to a transition, you cannot split the audio from the second one. It says there is already a clip there on the vocal track. Yet, if you drag the video to a later time, split it, and drag the new audio to overlap the audio for the previous video track, it will allow you to, and crossfade it for you. There is no reason why it couldn't position the audio clip to overlap a previous audio clip when splitting the audio; and crossfade it. WORKAROUND: I find it easiest to drag audio track for alternating tracks to a music track, and adjust the fades at will.

3. Snap works inconsistently with audio clips. If I drag an audio clip I split from a video, and is on a vocal track, down to a music track, it does not stay synchronized. If my mouse wanders right or left, and then I move it side to side, it will snap to the end of the video transition, but not the start. WORKAROUND: If I move it to be far later or earlier, let go, and move it back and forth near the right place, it will snap properly.

Some things VideoStudio really could use, to be a lot more professional, from my point of view, are:

1. Better volume control: if you click on the Sound Mixer mode, it begins to look like a real audio mixing application. The difficulty is, it lacks a lot of the basic features. It is nice that you can click a clip, and get a volume control point; and then drag it around. However, moving the mouse by a pixel at a time, you can only adjust the point's volume by jumps about 0.6-0.7 db at a time. In similar audio-only applications, you can either increase the height of tracks so as to get finer volume control, or hold down shift or control, and move in smaller jumps.

2. Multi-select: In dedicated audio application, you can multi-select volume points, and move them right or left without changing their volume, or up and down and change the volume of groups. Also, it would be nice to multi-select audio and video clips, and change their tracks and/or position on the timeline.

3. VST Plugins: To do audio like the pros, on Windows, that means supporting either RTAS, for the really expensive pro stuff, or more commonly, VST plugins. If you support these plugins, instead of your proprietary format, you will quickly gain a wealth of pro plugin capability for your users; and this might benefit other products besides VideoStudio. It may seem confusing, since DirectX plugin format is also an option; but for whatever reason, this format is largely passe, with only a few vendors bothering to support it anymore.

4. ASIO support: ASIO is THE professional audio driver format on PC's. It is far lower latency; resulting in faster playback from the time you hit play until the time you hear the sound. Only some audio hardware has native ASIO drivers, so some audio application authors at first didn't bother to support it; but there is a freeware driver called ASIO4ALL, which supports lower latency ASIO audio even for soundcards that don't support ASIO. Therefore, there is no excuse for a professional audio application not to support it. I am not aware of a video editor that does. It would be quite a "killer app." for VideoStudio; among audio guys, anyway. MacOS supports Firewire devices seamlessly, without even installing a driver; and so for Final Cut users, they don't need it. I am not aware of any PC video editing software that uses ASIO (and I can't get it to work right with Linux video software at all).

I hope this message makes it to the Corel guys supporting VideoStudio Pro. Call it a wish list from a rather knowledgeable audio guy. The video features seem great; it can work in and output to the formats I care about; and there are workarounds for its audio problems. Still, the audio features seem the weakest aspect of VS. I really hope Corel steps up to the plate on this one, and knocks it out of the park. You don't have to reinvent an entire recording studio app to do it: you don't need sophisticated busses, routing, control surface support, MIDI tracks or controller editors, score/keyboard/drum editors or a lot of your own high-quality EQ's, reverbs, etc. Still, it seems the weakest part of an otherwise strong, and seemingly greatly underrated, video editor.

TIA,
CodeLurker

[Ken Berry]

Thanks for these suggestions. I have drawn them to the attention of the Corel exec in charge of Video Studio development. I can't really comment as I have relatively modest needs when it comes to audio in my video projects, and those needs are fairly easily satisfied by using a third party audio editing program (nowadays mostly the freeware Audacity...)

[CodeLurker]

Another nice touch: I notice that in the Sound Mixing mode, you have volume and surround panning controls. Yet, when I set the volume, it makes no change in the volume handles. Currently, they seem to set the clip-wide properties. I imagine they might relate to volume and pan the way other audio software does: when you change them, they can be made to set volume and pan handles. You might think of handling this in one of two ways:

1) Use something like the existing keyframe mechanism, such that volume and pan can be set through such a dialog, with the option of "Use keyframes".

2) Do something very similar, except more directly, without a separate dialog, such that you can click on an event and the timeline, and set the volume and the pan, just by setting the controls. This would give finer control of pan and volume, and yet let the volume events be lined up with other events conveniently.

Many audio engineers will want to set a panning law for stereo, as well. These things are just an afterthought; but they are part and parcel of learning from the GUI of other audio apps.

Thanks for bringing this to the attention of the Corel guys. Audacity is a fine enough app. Its main limitation is it doesn't allow two events on the same track. For simple video projects, I can see how that would be fine. BTW: When I suggest allowing VST plugins, I am suggesting using them as non-destructive patches - as I believe the existing plugins do. I guess I'm suggesting some things as bugs with workarounds, which would be modest fixes, and other things that would really step VS's audio capabilities up to the next level.

[CodeLurker]

Wow. This thing really turned into a crashfest for me. I have a JPG that I created a title that I used the picture in picture effect to have slide down, fade in and enlarge, sit on the screen for a few seconds, and scroll down, fade out and enlarge further. I used the Burger Bloom effect to get decent wipes with a nicely blended transition; a la Star Wars. (The existing wipe effect doesn't blend the two images correctly, nor with much adjustability on the softness of the wipes.) I had a video my friend wanted me to edit, shot with his camera. It was a motion JPEG video format, 640x480, 25 fps (weird, I know), with mono 11024 kHz sound in an AVI container. I used those settings as the project settings, except 44.1 kHz audio, since I also used a song he had recorded as background music. It was all working pretty well beautifully, with only modest annoyances (why does removing one transition and dropping on another change the length of video clips?), and it previewed nicely. When I got to the end, and I thought I had my last edit made, it crashed. Autosave saved most of my work, but I quickly set it to 1 min. In the course of getting the last few edits in, using the exact same techniques as I was earlier on in the project, except with a clockwise wipe toward the end, it must have crashed about six times in less than two minutes of total edit time, although not reproducibly; such that sometimes it would play fine, and sometimes it would just crash. I used ffdshow to render to h264 and pcm into an AVI, and it came out beautifully. It looks like fine software, if it could just crash a little less. At least Corel seems more responsive to users than Sony; and it doesn't refuse most photos.

I thought this might be related to having an old version of fdshow (2010), but I have just now seen this crash ("unspecified error", I think it was) with no fdshow installed whatsoever. This severe bug seems to principally have happened when I had a jpg, followed by a black background, followed by a jpg on the video track, and an overlay consisting of title text (not on the text track) set up as picture in picture so as to animate it, followed by the videos themselves, followed by outro titles. To reproduce it, I would delete the last jpg, and replace it; and fiddle around with some transitions. It didn't happen at any predictable time, but it would alway (I think) happen during playback.