Sony Screenblast Movie Studio 3 vs. Others

[sbgirling]

I have a question and hope I can get a little feedback. How does Sony Screenblast Movie Studio 3 compare to say Ulead, Pinnacle Studio in term of quality of output? I'm really concerned both Ulead and Pinnacle Studio don't re-encode very well. I typically capture to uncompressed AVI from a digital camcorder via firewire and do all editing with those files prior to encoding to MPEG-2 (720x480). I'm will to give up features if need be to get a higher quality finished project on DVD.

I assume since the Sony tool is based on Vegas it would be a little better. And Best Buy has it for $60 right now so I'm tempted to get it but wanted some intelligent feedback first.

Thanks in advance for any help on this.

SG

[dougal]

If I may I'll tag my query on to the end of this one as it's quite similar. I'm after some recommendations for cheap/free DV editing software, and the 3 packages that SG mentions are all potential choices.

All I need is basic cutting and pasting of clips, and video and audio fades, maintaining the bulk of the DV unaltered throughout (I intend to use TMPGEnc for conversion to Mpeg and don't want any quality loss before this, during the DV editing process).

Windows Movie Maker would appear on the face of it to be ideal, but it seems to take a ludicrous amount of time to save files. For example, I tried to save a three minute segment of AVI (to which I'd added a fade in and out) and it took 10 minutes (processor Athlon XP2000+, ram 256MB) - I am wondering what exactly it was doing all that time and is there any way to speed it up?

VirtualDub looks nice enough - and it's free! - but there don't appear to be any fade functions?

So if anyone could recommend an editor that would meet my requirements, I'd be very grateful.

(ab)

[themichael]

EditStudio 4 ( http://www.puremotion.com/editstudio/index.htm ) works great with DV. You can get a deal if you buy DVDLab and ES4 together.

ES4 worked for me except the mpeg encoder was very limited. The DV output was just fine.

If you want free: AVISynth. AVS has a nice fade function. You can open with VirtualDub or watch with Windows Media ( I recommend ver 6, faster open and less resources).