Best low cost Editor

[Bstansbury]

Hopefully some of the experts out there can post their suggestions on this subject.

I have several choices on editing data. I plan to start with MPEG-2 data captured in I frames only at 15 mbs and 640x480 res. I need to edit out some bad scenes from my video, and possible add in a few titles, CD background sound, and a few fade in fade out.

I have Ulead VideoStudio 5.0, EZcreator 5.0 with Video Impression Suite, and of course I have Microsoft Movie Maker, TMPEGen, VirtualDub, etc.

So far I've only really used Movie Maker which is very easy to edit clips and scenes. I've also use VirtualDub to clip the ends of a few videos but not much more than that.

Any suggestions would really be appreciated.

[Rich927]

VideoStudio will do all the things you want. Not that hard of a program to use. Why 15fps and not 30fps? MovieMaker is slow rendering. TEMPEGen is slow also. I did a comparison between rendering with VideoStudio and TEMPEGen VideoStudio was 1/6.5 and TEMPEGen was 1/10 rendering an AVI file to MPG-1. That is to say for every minute of video with Videostudio, it took 6.5 minutes to render and 10 minutes with TEMPEGen. this is with a Pentium II 450 with 256meg of memory and Ultra ATA drives.

[Mirror_Image]

Perhaps the most important question when shopping for ANYTHING, and right up there with "what do I need it to do?":

What is my budget amount?

[Spicuzza]

Bstansbury,

If you have VideoStudio 5.0 you'll love VideoStudio 6.0. They have made great enhancements to the program.

i.e. larger viewing screen. instant playback, you no longer have to "render" the project for it to playback, also you no longer have to crop stills exactly to your frame size to avoid distortion which was a pain in the ass in earlier versions, also you direct where the captured video will be rather than before when it was buried in the project file in the Ulead program folder.

Regarding your message: "I plan to start with MPEG-2 data captured in I frames only at 15 mbs and 640x480 res." I've never had good luck with large frame sizes and or extremely high bit rates.

Personally, when I do my son's high school wrestling matches the source video is from a Canon Hi8 camcorder, captured to 352 x 480 avi uncompressed, edited with VideoStudio 6.0, then made into XVCD MPEG-1, 352 x 240, 2600 kbps, played on Pioneer DV-343. The resulting video is very good quality.

I hope this helps.

Gary Spicuzza
cic7@juno.com

p.s. Steve Spicuzza, Division 2a, 135 lbs, Florida State Champion!
February 23rd 2002