Help for the weary

[Havalilsi]

I'm fairly new to this video editing stuff. I've been struggling with Pinnacle for the past 4 months. Finally I found this site and it referrd me to other sites where I was able to get more information for me to realize finally I was being lazy and too dependent on Pinnacle, although I still use parts of it.

I'm trying to learn how to edit sermon videos for my church. At first I was trying to use Pinnacle, but to no avail. I kept having sync problems.
Now...
H/W: Shuttle PC w/1 GB RAM & 200 GB harddrive & Optorite burner
Capture app: WinDV
Video editing app: Pinnacle Studio Plus v9
Output: MPEG2 and AVI
Menu authoring and DVD burning: ULead

I've been hearing that DVDLab is a lot better than ULead. Any thoughts on this?

I need to find a program that will give me good transitions and menu screens and won't mess up the synchronization. Any suggestions would be helpful. Btw, money's tight.

[Baldrick]

ulead dvd workshop? or ulead dvd moviefactory??

[Havalilsi]

Ulead MovieFactory 4.0 Disc Creator Trial

[Baldrick]

when do you get sync problems?

[GeorgeW]

I need to find a program that will give me good transitions and menu screens and won't mess up the synchronization. Any suggestions would be helpful. Btw, money's tight.

Are you looking for an Editing and Authoring solution?

With buget in mind, I saw Sony's Vegas Movie Studio+DVD for $50.00 (after rebate). That might be a good Editing/Authoring combination.

Another combination is Ulead's VideoStudio 9.0 (just released).

[Havalilsi]

Most of the sync problems generally start showing up at the middle of the movie and gets progressively worse towards the end. This happens for every movie I've made so far.

I am looking for any editing / authoring solution that will work and isn't too expensive. The solution does not have to be one do-it-all program as long as the programs play well together, so to speak.

[jdizzy40]

Do yourself a big favor after 4 weeks, ditch Pinnacle.

[harmlessgryphon]

Just throwing out random ideas here, but have you verified that the video is being captured at a perfect 29.970fps, or 25fps if you're using PAL.

I found that when I capture video, the audio and video frame rate get out of synch sometimes. It's usually only .01 fps, but it's enough that an hour's worth of video is off at the end.

I use Virtualdub to pre-process the .AVI from the capture. I usually have to check the "Change so video and audio durations match" under source rate adjustment. The MPEG2 encoder takes care of it after that. At least, it seems to.

[Havalilsi]

Do yourself a big favor after 4 weeks, ditch Pinnacle.

Actually I've just come to grips that I wasted money( I went through a 50 pack of DVDs ) and months of wasted time. I was just being lazy I guess. I still use it just to renderAVI to MPEG2 file for burning and to put on the web. This website have alot of info, its like sensory overload.