Folks, I'm not a total newbie but haven't been testing many of the new DVD Authoring Suites available these days. I know there is a serious move to HD (BluRay) but I'm not there yet so it's not really important to me. (My Panasonic PV-GS70D mini DV Camera is still working perfectly.) However, my Brother just got a Sony HD Video Camera and he's waiting for me to tell him what Package to use! Can you advise what you think is the superior packages available? I'm really not into a bunch of separate apps, each doing a piece of the puzzle. I was a long time user of Pinnacle Studio (from version 7 to about 10 => I even got my Brother to get 11) but I couldn't justify the $$ to move to either of us to version 12 as prior versions, which had some incredible features, were just too unreliable to throw more $$ that way. The reason I stuck it out so long was my investment in the learning curve / familiarity with their package; and the hope they'd get the bugs worked out. I've made some great DVDs with their package, but the pain seems to have me looking for greener pastures. ( I never really liked the Studio Add-ons which nickle and dime you to death either. I hope to avoid that and have a complete suite purchased ready to go. I don't mind having it on a separate Hard Drive, as I found that the best way to run Pinnacle Studio.) I know one could move to Professional level packages (Adobe Premier, Pinnacle Liquid Edition, etc., ) but they seem overkill for converting home movies of family vacations and such. Perhaps a "Pro-sumer" level is more applicable. I've got a couple of years of tape ready to edit and need to get going on this. Could you offer some advice and experience? Thanks for the assist. Regards, Jim
The 2 editors I use are videoredotvsuite, this is a basic frame accurate editor that works very fast. I can edit a mpeg file or an entire dvd movie with it, quality loss is very minimal. But this doesn't have any special effects,transitions etc. The other editor is womble mpeg video wizard dvd, this has transitions, titles,multiple audio tracks etc. It is also a frame accurate editor and depending on the output it might not have to reencode. If you want to edit avi (xvid/divx) the best program for that is the free avidemux, it is frame accurate and doesn't do an reencode of the edited video.
Thanks for the response. (Seems strange to be listed as a Newbie even though I've been a member for a long, long, time. My profile says my account was created "Monday 23 February 2004" but I think that's when the Board crashed and burned all the accounts. Oh well, at least I'm still here...) My Panasonic DV Camera outputs into an Avi file so I'm looking for an integrated program to handle that all the way to burning a DVD. However, in the past when using the older versions of Pinnacle Studio,I did use Nero to burn it to a disk as it was much quicker than using Studio's own burning application.
