I use Videostudio and recently I have upgraded to v9. Even though I'm an advanced amateur I like Videostudio because you get something done without to much troubles. I have tried Premiere and didn't like it as muchs as UVS, even if you can do a bit more advanced things (which you rarely do anyway).
I'm not perfectly satisfied with the mpeg encoder though. The picture is sharp and of good quality exept for the black level which is way of, if I compare with the original DV capture from the camera (The black gets dark grey after encoding).
My sollution so far has been to use a free frameserver (Debugmode free frame server) and then used another mpeg encoder, such as Canopus Procoder, to encode the mpeg file outside VS without the large intermediate AVI file.
Then, the other day, I read some old post here about hacking the UVS.INI file and put advanced=1 in a couple of places. The posts also mentioned that ulead.mpeg.now was indeed a stripped down version of then Mainconcept encoder from Germany.
Offcource I wanted to try the standalone version of Mainconcept to compare.
There is much more settings and better VBR handling in the full version but the main problem about the black level had a really easy sollution, read on....
If I ticked the "Input video is RGB 16-235" in Mainconcept I got the same ugly washed out results in Videostudio !
So, my wishes is to be able to set that chroma level in Videostudio.
I wonder if anyone more then me have noticed this ? Maybe some of you have a coment or sollution ? It would be great to know if there are other souls out there with same experience as me
Anyway, I guess I have to framecode in the future as well
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