| User review:
|
Even though I have access to almost every tool in the pro world (company stuff) I have yet to find easier program to use then Studio 8. As many others I went through my share of cursing the Pinnacle while trying to make it work (could not open graphic files, no matter what) I finally got it, using reg clean prog. from the Pinnacle support site (I BELIEVE 6TH ATTEMPT TO INSTALL). Well worth it. Editing hours of my private footege was a breeze utilizing scene detection feature. Can't beat the quality of the DV AVI as well. Tried Adobe PremierePro and... surprise, DV quality was less (too soft). This is what i did. Starting from MPEG2 original (that is my capture file from ADS box) converted it to DV AVI, edited it and reencoded to DVD quality. MPEG2 to DV AVI conversion with Adobe was not too sharp so I tried Trex from Pinnacle and... was more then amazed. Details were more distinct, sound in sync, what more could you ask for. Later comparison of such conv. in Vegas 4 only confirmed my my suspicion. I would rate it as follows (quality of DV file): Vegas-8, Adobe-9, TRex 1.7-10!.
Weird, cause 2 other are using same Mainconcept encoders (but probably only for MPEG2). AVI's seem to be Microsoft DV standard. I tested AVI output quality from all 3 and once again in terms of detail Pinnacle had the edge. Considering ease of use I chose it to be my tool for basic edit (too bad you cannot crop in Studio 8). the rest of postprod. will be done unfortunately in Vegas (I love the logic and simplicity of this product, up to this moment it was my favourite). As to Studio 8: editing 50 min. avi from 2.5 hr footage took me 1 day (5 hrs). Pretty amazing. Can't say I wasted a minute trying to learn the program because there is nothing to learn. Hardest part was outputting the whole AVI. No matter what I did it rendered only parts with transitions leaving the reat untouched. My goal was to save it all to 1 AVI and reencode it with Pinnacle Edition 5.1 which I consider No.1 in MPEG2 encoding quality (tried TMPEG, Procoder 1.5, CCE and MC 1.4).
Again, love MC1.4 for speed and quality (10), TMPEG (9) for weird handling of static backgrounds (it "refreshes" background every sec. or so giving the impression of slight stutter, not so with all others), Procoder (9) for softening backgrounds and
CCE... well never got the output that would match all others.
Found the way to render the whole AVI to 1 file as the default DV Encoder would not do that. Just use any other DV codec like Mainconcept and voila. One remark, it seems that audio has a tendency to jump ahead of video, pain in the... but that can be quickly fixed in Vegas. Overall great product this Studio 8, except for its software coding quality (fussy and prone to crashes). Never lost anything though due to autosave feature which I have set to 1 min. Last thing, MPEG 2 encoding part should preferably be done in other app. like TMPEG. You will get less noise due to better quality encoding. |
