| User review:
|
I used to use Pinnacle Studio 7 which came as part of Studio Deluse which provides for capature of Analog as well as DV. Using Studio 7 I generally captured most of my movies in 10-12 minute sections, which I rendered to both MPEG1 & MPEG2.
I used my CD-RW burner to save the MPEG2s as data files on CD-Rs, waiting for the day when I would buy a DVD-RW burner. In the meantime I would burn several of the MPEG1s in sequence to create VCDs. I successfully captured from VHS tapes and from my DV camcorder. I also successfully output to VHS, DV camcorder, MPEG1 & MPEG2.
About a week ago Ipurchased an LG GSA-4040B DVD burner. A also upgraded to the latest version of Studio 8. So far all I have done is create DVDs using MPEG2s which I had stored as data from my Studio 7 days.
My first attempt was to burn a 100 minute DVD with nested menus. Due to poor documentation it took me a long time to work out how to make the sub menus return to their parent menus(in this case the main menu), but having eventually solved this it is easy and obvious, once you know how. Due to the length of the movie Studio re-rendered it @ 51% quality.
The resulting DVD worked fine, menus and all, but I didn't much like the picture quality. Also due to the re-rendering it took ages (about 5 minutes per minute of DVD on my P4 1.6Ghz).
I then split my project into two and created two 50 minute DVDs. This also worked fine, picture quality was better (since the MPEG2s had all been created from analog sources, the picture quality was always going to have some limitations). I assume that because I was now working at 100% quality the rendering process was much much faster.
Out of 10 DVDs I've burned only one turned out to ba coaster and I guess that was because I tried to burn at 2X on a blank unbranded DVD which didn't say if it could handle 2X. So far all of the DVDs I've burned on Verbatim & Samsung media have been fine.
I did have Studio hang on me a couple of times when I tried to edit menus which I had already created and dropped into the project. apart from that I've had no problems.
I guess my next step will be to see if Studio 8, does as good a job of capture from analog and DV and then rendering into MPEG2 from AVI, as Studio 7 did.
|
