Can you Pick the editing software for ME?

[Marty Welk]

If i gave you my specs? I need new HD editing software.
Strictally PC not Mac.
My computers power is good, and if need be i can competly replace/upgrade the computer.

I use Storm edit now, quick fast easy simple done, works for 80% of what i do, NEVER failed.

Then i also use Adobee Premiere, complex pain in the butt, crashes often (good thing it has auto save or i would have tossed my computer out the window on numerous occasions). I only use premiere when the job is more complex than the simplicity of Storm edit would allow.

My Main Editing Tasks:
Quick cutting, simple transition , quick adding sound, quick color control - Storm

2-3 camera reassemble with dissolves - Premiere, using the cheap quick fast rubberbanding. Not Using split clip and reassemble with transition. the 2 cams are non-stop running , 100% synced , one time sync .
Much of what i did on Premiere was combining 2 cams , with no edits, with NO transistion, no virtual clips, often no filters even , as i could toss the final into storm to quick clip and filter to finish.

About everything else i would do is covered in all of the programs. what i want is "Windows movie maker" Plus with a good interface, and totally reliable.

I do not make Films, i do video and it ranges from 5 mintues to 3 HOURS (which can be broken to 1.5h). i used to work with Whole Pieces out of the camera , not Shots like the new Solid state cameras, so clip Management was not an issue. Now i will get a bunch of clips instead.

I hate Crashes, or software failures , i am willing to put up with any ammount of User controls setting required, but the program having workarounds and failures is not an option. i want a simple interface, and preferably a external monitor.

the 2 i BELIEVE suit my editing style are the Edius again, and i Really like the look of sony Vegas. Problem is programs (as usual) have myriads of problems , crashes and heck i saw a LIST of the freaking things they both need to fix, and it included some of the most simplistic tasks failing miserably.

My Codec is the EX-Cam stuff, and whatever out of the nano.

If i Get Edius (being a former storm user) is it totally stable , because it isnt looking that way to me.

If i switch Styles and go with Sony Vegas, would it be more reliable?

If i update Adobee to the latest complex mess they pumped out this week, Skip that, i hate adobee.

[Perrone Ford]

Three crucial questions

1. What kind of HD footage? (P2,XDCam, HDV,AVCHD)
2. Are you willing to wait for a transcode? (Cineform, CanopusHQ, etc)
3. Price Range?

[Marty Welk]

1. What kind of HD footage? (P2,XDCam, HDV,AVCHD)
Xdcam and Nano

2. Are you willing to wait for a transcode? (Cineform, CanopusHQ, etc)
I am willing to sleep while making any needed proxies, and Sleep when outputting a project off the timeline, and Sleep while creating a dvd, i dont want to sleep when i am editing.

3. Price Range?
say 500-900, i think the overly complex stuff costs more, so i was not worried about costs (yet)

let me also point out, that Lots of the stuff that transferred the CPU work over to the 3D GPU on the computer did not do it well enough. Many things i tried and gave up on, to improve speed, had various Flaws, like tiny color shifts, tiny softness changes, minor bumps and stuff like that. My stuff doesnt look THAT GOOD, but nothing ticked me off more than an added visual blip into my stuff.

[Perrone Ford]

Ok,

So you want pro results, but aren't really ready to shell out pro money. Vegas has been the salvation of folks in that situation. So I would suggest Vegas WITH THE CAVEAT, that you have a decent machine with a lot of RAM and CPU, running Win7, and that you transcode to Cineform.

Currently, the hot combo is running Vegas 8.0c and Vegas 9 64bit as a pair for different tasks. I have to bounce back and forth between 9 32bit and 9 64bit because Magic Bullet doesn't work in 64bit yet.

I get realtime playback in V9 64bit of consumer level AVCHD *IF* I am in 8-bit mode. This mode is fine for editing. But for doing color, move to 32 bit mode, then render out. Any other pro level solution is going to cost you much more money. I am testing Avid right now, and all these issues you speak of just went away. All my problems with performance, color, etc., just disappeared. It's a boatload of money, but it's absolutely bulletproof, and I can understand why it's a staple in Hollywood.

So Vegas + Cineform, or maybe Edius 5, but that's 8-bit only right now. FCP and AVID really have the upper end locked up for general NLE suites. Premiere, Edius, and potentially Vegas are all there in the next grouping with various strengths and weaknesses among them.

[Marty Welk]

but i dont want to transcode, if possible to avoid, unless its just a header change, or to the output format. DVD or blu-dvd.

what were doing now is DV in DV out, and often it is the exact same bits that went in, nothing had to be de-compressed and recompressed if it wasnt being altered. Of course more stuff is being altered than before :-( the canopus codec was also truely amasing when it came to de-re-compression, but even at that i would only "allow" that once.

if its Vegas, cant sonys own program work with thier own codec, without destroying it if it doesnt change?

If i have to shift everything over to a format that works on the editor, then i "might think about" shifting it to full oncompressed. but i wouldnt know what i was getting into with 4x the data , but i think i have the space and speed for that having 4T of raid.

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Marty Welk

but i dont want to transcode, if possible to avoid, unless its just a header change, or to the output format. DVD or blu-dvd.

It's NOT possible. Not with today's computer hardware. Maybe 2 years from now.

Originally Posted by Marty Welk

what were doing now is DV in DV out, and often it is the exact same bits that went in, nothing had to be de-compressed and recompressed if it wasnt being altered. Of course more stuff is being altered than before :-( the canopus codec was also truely amasing when it came to de-re-compression, but even at that i would only "allow" that once.

DV was 25Mbps of intra-frame at 1/5th the frame size. Even something as light as XDCamEX is 35Mbps of Long-GOP at 5 times the frame size. You are playing in a whole different league. AVCHD probably takes about 5-10 times the horsepower to decode that Mpeg2 does.

Originally Posted by Marty Welk

if its Vegas, cant sonys own program work with thier own codec, without destroying it if it doesnt change?

Sony has no intermediate codec. They have capture codecs, and delivery codecs. Nothing inbetween for HD.

Originally Posted by Marty Welk

If i have to shift everything over to a format that works on the editor, then i "might think about" shifting it to full oncompressed. but i wouldnt know what i was getting into with 4x the data , but i think i have the space and speed for that having 4T of raid.

Full Uncompressed is 1.5Gbps. Your XDCamEX is 35Mbps. You are talking on the order of 50 times the size. You are talking over terabyte per hour. If you've got the speed and the space, have at it. It's unfortunate that Vegas is SO slow with the DNxHD codec. The quality is easily good enough for mastering and the proxy is nice for editing. That's how I use it. But Vegas is pitifully slow working with .MOV files of any kind.

There is no simple, cheap solution. Either you spend real money and the problem goes away, or keep the money in your pocket, and do the workarounds. By the way, Cineform absolutely should stomp CanopusHQ for quality at a given bitrate. It's not even close.

[Warren Kawamoto]

Marty,
How did you get the idea that Edius isn't stable?
If you're used to Storm edit, you'll be very happy with the stability of Edius 5.12. It's rock solid, just like the good old Storm. With Edius 5, you can throw just about every format at it, and it will play just fine, no rendering necessary. If you're shooting EX, simply drag your clips from Clipbrowser straight to the Edius bin, no transcoding necessary. From the timeline, you can burn a blu ray or regular dvd. So simple...
Oh yeah, I did manage to crash Edius once this year, when I tried to open a corrupted file.

[Marty Welk]

Cool, with Edius, Will i also be able to dissolve switch between 2 non-stop video timelines, without adding in "transitions" or breaking the clips, for the purpose of assembling two long lenght camera shoots into a single mix?
because storm could not do that Easily at all.

Could I mabey even do a live switch in the computer, then very slightly manually adjusting that live switch without having ripple effects or disconnected parts and pieces?

Because again, in Premier i could do the switching with ONLY rubberbanding on the timeline, and the clips would still be one solid piece. so shifting, syncing, resyncking whole clip corrections and other stuff like that could be done Simply, because the clip was Still never broken up.

Transitioning to the second video in storm meant filter stuff (2steps each), or Transistion stuff (clip seperation).

I know the clip never really seperated , and all i was seeing was a virtual representation, it was the virtual mess that got made when i go from 2 simple video pieces blending between, to 600 clip items, transitions all over the place and a mess so big it was uncontrollable .

With the long clip rubberbanding if a error was made or even many errors, the video was still in Sync, and one or the other cameras was still showing, no bumps blips or losses. And
Audio was still in its full long length whole piece , giving the ability to cross mix filter re-sync and turn on or off, and all the other things you can Still do when there are no breaks.

If a single piece of video was missing or i cut or deleted , or bumped it the wrong way, it was the WHOLE video, so nothing could go wrong that couldnt be seen instantally :-)
with the clip transistion style, a small single item could be offset , wrong, bumped ripple deleted, have wrong filteration , or other things, and that single small piece would be lost in a mess of hundreds of others.

That is why i was forced to use premier for a re-assembly of cameras.

[Andy Tejral]

Edius has a multi-cam mode and it works pretty good. I haven't used it in quite some time but as I recall, it does chop up the your 'mix' in the way you seem to dislike (if I understand you). It is just the way an editing program has to work.

But, it is easy to move the transition points. The item I was working on was short--6 minutes and only two cameras. So I made a temp mix live and then went back and readjusted a lot of the transition points. It was a fairly painless operation. I think you use trim mode so all the tracks stay in sync. At any rate, sync was never a problem.

[Marty Welk]

yes you do understand , that is what i need to know

i will show you, like i should have to begin with, how "clean" and comprehendable it looks compared to what we see as the usual timeline .

http://home.comcast.net/~TVV0/RubberTimeline.jpg
this is a 10minute section of my timeline of the most recent program.
the line up is one cam, the line down is the other. this can be done with as many cams as you can shove on the timeline with the editor having to remember which "layer" is atop the other.
I work a lot closer than this (of course) but when I zoom back out of the timeline as you can see it is still completly comprehendable.

length of the dissolve, time in time out all adjustable by just moving the points around. imagine if each of the lines changes was a stupid icon, a box, cut marks and the usual stuff.

This is not a typical premier timeline, this is doing cheap tricks i somehow learned on my own, to get premiere to do what i wanted.
any other program that has timeline rubberbanding type stuff with adjustable keying or something? might do the same thing ??

ALPHA KEY <--- thats what it is ??? all i know is it does a perfect transparency blending thing, which is a very good dissolve when it goes from top to bottom, at whatever variable rate you set on the timeline. Because it is always in this mode, there is no bumps or changes when some "transition" is used , it doent try and offload the work to GPU or anything goofey. The dissolving can be done and altered instantally with respect to the music timeline, which still isnt as good as live, but it helps.

http://home.comcast.net/~TVV0/RubberTimeline2.jpg
This is the Timeline zoom level I work at when doing the video combine. 1 second, usually only one audio wave is showing with the others minimized. (the out of sync audios are just backups)

ok so its more complex than that, if you want to know all of it.
PIP and transparency filters are used to see ALL the views on one monitor when editing. Initially i only lower the "unused" item by 50%, so on the PIPs only the bright picture is the one i selected, after getting all the lines in place , i go back and pull down the lines , and remove the PIP.
Because this alpha does not bother to bring up a video not seen, when you preview or render the final, video not used does not tax the computer. Most of the video is still untouched except at the dissolve.
Overlay type keying is done by just moving the line so far, wherin you can have both pictures there at say 50% for as long as you want, and shift them back to one or the other camera too. all within the same single stupid simple move of the mouse. no menu to go to, no drag and drop, no popups to alter the timing, it is all right there in the one view.
this renders out about 6 times real time when done.

[Marty Welk]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

It's NOT possible. Not with today's computer hardware. Maybe 2 years from now.

Full Uncompressed is 1.5Gbps. Your XDCamEX is 35Mbps. You are talking on the order of 50 times the size. You are talking over terabyte per hour. .

In MB/s which is how the testing stuff shows my HD speed that would be ~187MB/s your right that is 2 TIMES faster than my hard drives could keep up. it would take Quad Raid-0 with high Rpm drives and still that would choke on the various pipelines through my computer. and that would be only 1 Stream, trying to run 2 streams and it would be turtle time. :-(
I would probably want to edit with SD downconverted proxies or something, then render whatever after that.

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Marty Welk

I would probably want to edit with SD downconverted proxies or something, then render whatever after that.

And this is why the offline/online (or proxy) workflow is as popular as it is. Do your cuts and editing with proxy sized material for speed, and then replace it with originals prior to final render. Works like a charm and many, many people still cut this way.

Only recently have people started to do HD proxy level editing. The machines are now fast enough to do "light" HD stuff in real time with effects. Generally 35-45 Mbps is about the sweet spot for this if using DCT compressed files like ProRes, DNxHD, Canopus, etc.

It's good enough to let you see real detail, but not SO large that it chokes your processor and disks.

[Chad Haufschild]

I've read your post and I think we're missing a key piece of information. When you say that your computer's power is "pretty good" what do you mean? What are your system specs?

That's super important when we start talking about multiple HD streams and editing real time. Perrone has given some good advice but if your working with a single core system with 2 gigs of ram it won't matter what NLE you use. It will just be slow.

Your editing xdcam. Even with the cool name it's still just mpeg compressed video. Anytime you're dealing with compressed video you need enough power behind it to "unfold" the video for smooth playback. Put two or three in a time line and you're talking requiring a lot of processing power.

Vegas will edit xdcam natively and has some powerful muti-camera editing tools. Honestly, they all do these days, FCP, PPro, etc. You may want to install the trial versions of a few Windows-based softwares and play with them, You may find you like them better than your current process.

[Marty Welk]

the computer right now is a single duel core pent at 3.6g with 3 gig ram, XP32bit and every feature of XP that would effect anything shut off or controlled to be able to shut off.
with 5t of drive space 2t of it raid0 for editing. most of it speed comes from being stripped down so nothing gets in the way.

changing the mainboard, and putting in 2 quads or something as long as they are not zenon, would be possible. shifting to a new operating system would wipe out my stripped down operating system and put me back into that loop, of spending days on end getting rid of microsoft features.

[Chad Haufschild]

Hey, Marty. Thanks for the info. Those specs are pretty good. Is the intel chip a Core2Duo or older? If your current motherboard can handle a quadcore I can see that being an advantage to you.

Now, I'm not sure how vast your computer knowledge is so forgive me I've I'm telling you stuff you already know, but it is very possible that turning off too many or the wrong Windows services could be causing many of your stability issues.

I've been professionally building and maintaining Windows-based editors for myself and paying clients for just under a decade now. Everything from Adobe to Avid to Sony to Edius and even some consumer and specialty products, and I can tell you that turning off the wrong Windows service can affect some products a lot while leaving others without an issue. It's my experience that you're best bet is to leave it all on. Seriously. The key is to keep all the other crap that gets installed as you configure a system turned off. That means installing as little as possible other than your required tools needed to do the job.

Here's the bad news. Upgrading your motherboard will result in a 95% chance that Windows will bluescreen and not boot at all. That's built into Windows as part of their anti-piracy junk. It keeps people from cloning drives and sticking them in any old computer. There are ways to increase the odds of success, but eventually system performance issues always lead to a format/reload.

I don't think your stability issues are as much software related as they are computer related. That's just my opinion based on my experiences. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I'm an Adobe user. Edited two feature films, uncountable commercials and hundreds of event videos up to 2 and half hours long starting as eary as Premiere 5.5 all the way up to CS3 (waiting for CS5 before I upgrade again).

Happy Christmas and good luck.