What video magazines do you guys read?

[fmctm1sw]

I picked up a copy of PCTools the other day. After I opened it, I saw articles on Audacity and Goldwave and the like. So I figured it was at "my level." It also had (supposedly) free full programs of ParticleIllusion SE, Advanced X Video Coonverter, Pure Motion Editstudio 2, and Movie Edit Silver. It has another CD that has a ton of freeware/shareware apps to try. I wasn't happy about the $12 I paid for it but hopefully I'll be able to use some of the programs. What do you read?

[lordsmurf]

None.

This may come off wrong, but I tend to know more than the people that write those articles. I should be writing some of them, but I don't want to move to the east coast or west coast, which is where ost of them are from. It's actually quite disappointing. A site like VideoHelp is really the only place I tend to learn anything, and even then, mostly by interacting with people via PM, not much by posts.

EDIT: I just want to clarify that this is a statement about general consumer, home-use video magazines. Some of those pro trade pubs are greek to me! Stuff I'll never use.

[sacajaweeda]

I own a copy of Jim Taylor's book, if that counts for anything.

[BJ_M]

i'm paperless - i dont want all those free trade mags anymore and prefer to read on-line and save a tree ...

[sacajaweeda]

I'm going out later and I'm going to carve www.videohelp.com into a tree somewhere.

[Capmaster]

American Photo is the closest I get to reding a print video mag. That, PC World and PC Magazine. No true Video magazines.

[lordsmurf]

How do you like some of those ridiculous video capture comments in PC World?

A lot of those trade mags BJ_M mentions I probably got for free (bensbargains.net signups), mostly stuff that was unrelated to what we do at home. Some of them used terms I'd never heard, and probably never will again. I found myself putting them in the recycle bin as soon as they came.

Magazines for home video users (this is what my first comment was about, just felt the need to clarify) seem to be written for monkeys, by monkeys.

[johns0]

Never need to read a computer magazine,i get up to date info from dvdrhelp.com and google.

[monzie]

This site has taught me more in the last year than any article i have ever read in a magazine. Lets put it another way, magazines EXIST by advertizing revenues so what interest would ANY magazine have in NOT SELLING YOU 'sellable' solutions?

Magazines are like Lawyers...they dont tell you 'eff all' for free as its NOT in their interest...they may well give you guides on using the latest Adobe products (for instance) but who are they REALLY helping? Think about it.

[lordsmurf]

I was reading DV just now (Digital Video, DV Magazine), November 2004 current issue, and wanted to point out an article. This magazine generally has some interesting nuggets, but the reviews.... well... I'll let you judge:

The article is on DVDit! 5 by Dave O. Weissman (bio at end says he's the general manager of Video Arts, a digital video and interactive design company in San Francisco). Now, I don't know what good old Dave-O has experience-wise with authoring, but it's obviously not much.

He clearly states that the early versions of DVDit! (LE, SE, PE) could not "do motion menus, or handle Photoshop file and Dolby Digital audio".

DID THIS GUY EVEN USE THE DAMNED SOFTWARE? I'd say not.

Maybe I've been in a trance since 2001, but I clearly remember using PSD files for menu objects. And those AC3 files... Hmm... I wonder what that could have been.

He then goes on to praise DVDit! 5 as decent software, as good as competitors. He's quite happy with a software that takes his AVI and transcodes his DV file in 30 minutes. It's a real shame he didn't give it a non-dummy test...

Like the fact that the software crashes about 50% of the time. It's slow software even on fast P4 processors (not talking about transcode or authoring, just simply opening the software and using it). That it ALMOST ALWAYS insists on re-encoding compliant MPEG-2 files. This is after being tested by two people on five different systems. He did pick up on the fact that the error messages are worthless (at least I THINK that's what he meant). Oh, and Sonic Solutions tech support is a joke (anybody remember that post where I was told to "update" to MyDVD 5 by them?).

Note to Dave: Don't quit your day job. It's crap articles like this that end up angering consumers after they've bought this kind of beta-quality software, only to later learn the "testing" done by the writer was poor. Poor, poor, poor. I'm even more shocked that a "pro" would let his authoring app transcode his DV for him. What's that? A high school kid with TMPGENC knows better! Unless I'm mistaken, Sonic uses a water-down version of MainConcept, which is already an encoder that gets mediocre marks as a full application.

At least the magazine make mention of "Video Help at videohelp.com" a few times.

If anybody wants a free sub, go here:
http://dv.com/freeyear
It's surely not worth more than $0.00 from this type of "quality" writing.

It did have a nice article on COPYRIGHT LAW that should be a pre-req reading for most people. And the article on descontructing your DVDs was quite nicely done too.

The thing about magazines is everything is all nicey-wicey and happy face. It's all positive, and negative opinions are watered down. The nice thing about an Internet forum is you can say something "blows goats" if you really need to get the point across. None of this "well, it tries, and it's blah blah blah..". A simple "it sucks" is much faster to write, and you can move on to actually covering something better that does work.

[spiderman2k1]

I learned ever thing from www.videohelp.com and www.doom9.org and http://www.avsforum.com/

[housepig]

DV is it, since I got a free sub. There's not enough in it that's applicable to what I do to make it work paying for, but it has the occasional good article.

And Digit from the UK is good, but spendy here - I only pick it up if they are throwing down good software on the cover disc.

[freestyler]

Puritan Video Magazine here

[Capmaster]

How do you like some of those ridiculous video capture comments in PC World?

Some of them are funny, and some are just misdleading to the noobs. I read it for the PC-only stuff. I much prefer PC Magazine, but I got a bunch of free subscriotions for converting frequent flier miles, and it was either PC World or "O-G Yo"*



*(Original Gangsta)

[housepig]

Puritan Video Magazine here

nice. very nice.

[mmasw]

Puritan Video Magazine here

and for an international perspective you can always try Private Video Magazine