Pinnacle Studio 8 AV- Cutting render time by 50%

[BobK]

When I used to try to use Studio 8 it took about 6 hours to render 2 hours of video to DVD. Occasionally I still use it to capture poor quality video, but I mostly capture to mpeg2 and author with TMPGEnc DVD Author or Power Producer 2 Gold.

I could never get any other program to open the avi files captured by Studio (I could open them to play in Media Player, but couldn't open them in any programs to convert them). Today I tried Cyberlink's Power Producer 2 Gold- and it worked. It took a little less than 2 hours to convert 1 hour of avi video to DVD files. Using Studio 8 that would normally take at least 4-5 hours- if it didn't crash while rendering.

Power Producer isn't free, but it was well worth the cost to me and will save me a lot of time.

I thought this information might be useful to anyone that uses Studio 8 to capture to avi. I haven't used Studio 9, but if it's as slow as Studio 8 then some 9 users might also get some use from this.

[northcat_8]

I think you may have some other issues at work. I capture to DV-AVI using Pinnacle Studio 8 and the AVIs play in everything and I can open them in anything I've tried. I also use Adobe Premiere and After Effects as editors as well.

One problem with capturing to MPEG-2 is if you need to do any amount of editing to the video. MPEG-2 is a compressed format and does not handle editing very well. You may run into some audio sync issues down the road.

One thing I always do with Studio 8 is I keep everything as DV-AVI until it is finished and then I use TMPGEnc PLUS to convert...I love the batch process feature!

I have tried using S8 to convert to MPEG-2 but I too get freezes if the video is too long...that's why I went TMPGEnc route. 6 hours is WAY too long, my I suggest streamlining your system for video...it will save you time.

Thanks for the info, I will keep my eyes open for that software and give it a run.

[BobK]

> One problem with capturing to MPEG-2 is if you need to do any amount of editing to the video. MPEG-2 is a compressed format and does not handle editing very well. You may run into some audio sync issues down the road.

I don't do much editing. I cut the commercials out of anything off TV. With most of the video I'm converting the only editing is setting new start and end points, and cutting out any bad sections of video. If I really have to add transistions, titles, etc I'll do those in S8- usually 10-20 seconds and then add them to the video in DVD Author.

I've already run into audio-sync issues, but I found solutions to those problems that still don't take nearly as long as rendering with Studio 8. The simplest solution (when is works- which is 95% of the time) with DVD Author is to split the clips into segments of 15 minutes or less. It keeps everything in sync until around 18-20 minutes, so if I keep the clips short it's not a problem.

With Power Producer I haven't yet any any problems with audio sync. But the menu options suck. So what I'm doing now is using Power Producer to create a DVD with no menu. Then I import that DVD into TMPGEnc DVD Author to add the menu. Another plus is that when I import a DVD created with Power Producer into DVD Author it solves most of the sync issues too. About 1 out of 10 times I have to split the imported DVD into short segments to keep everything in sync.

I also tried using S8 to create mpeg-2 files after editing an avi. But the audio goes out of sync that way too.

> Thanks for the info, I will keep my eyes open for that software and give it a run.

They have a 30-day trial. It will only do 30 minutes of video at a time, but that was enough for me to see how much better it was than anything else I've tried.