Jan 09 2006
You may remember that a while ago I lamented the fact that I could not get a trial version of the new Adobe Elements 2.0 from Adobe. Well, I’ve just checked again, and it seems that (as of 15 December 2005) there is finally a “tryout” version available.
Now I just need to find the time to properly evaluate it. Sigh.
Read more at: Premiere Elements for Windows Downloads.
Dec 19 2005
A few months ago I entered the StockStock film festival. It sounds a good idea - they choose a bunch of video from the Internet Archive and anyone who stumps up $20 gets a copy of their chosen material on tape. The entrant then gets a few weeks to edit it in to something interesting before posting back a completed entry.
So why am I disappointed? Because it seems that despite their novel use of archive footage they seem locked in a weird time warp when it comes to communication and sharing.
This is crazy. I understand that my entry was probably not good enough to make the screening, but how can I get any better with neither feedback nor the ability to see the work of other entrants?
By diligent web searching, I have managed to find a very small number of other entrants who have made their entries from this year’s competition available on-line:
While searching, I also found a few entries from last year, too, but still no official page, or links.
A few others have mentioned their entries, but not (yet) made them available:
If any readers know of any others, please let me know and I’ll add to this list.
And to the stockstock folks, if you read this:
You have a fantastic opportunity to connect a thriving community of movie editors, please don’t waste it by being a black hole and thinking that one screening (to what, a few hundred people?) is the end of the road. Share the love.
Dec 18 2005
I don’t tend to use the divx codec much at the moment, but it’s still interesting to note that that a new version is available. Anyone interested in playing with this generally well-regarded codec should probably get a copy.
Read more at: DivX 6.1 released… and yes it works with the new Dr. | Dr. DivX 2.0
Dec 16 2005
Definately worth a look; Eventdv.net has a steadily growing collection of digital video related articles. I’m still working my way through them . . .
Dec 13 2005
I love accents and regional dialects, so I was enthralled to find IDEA, the International Dialects of English Archive. There are some interesting samples available, but unfortunately they seem to have a somewhat harsh view on what you can do with them. There also seems some confusion on what rights they give out. The above “copyright” page states:
You may play an IDEA recording or text file in a lecture, class, training session, or workshop directly from the internet, or your students may do so from their own individual terminals, without obtaining special permission; but distributing copies of them either by disc or by digital file, requires special permission and the payment of an appropriate fee.
Yet the front page of the site states:
Once you have chosen a recording to download, simply click on it and save it — at no cost to you!
And when you get to a page of samples it states even more forcefully:
**IMPORTANT** In order to properly play these soundfiles, you must first save them to your hard drive! Please right-click on the desired sample and choose to save it to your computer. Our server does not support streaming audio at this time.
I leave it to you to work out what you actually may or may not do.
Via Complications ensue.
Dec 07 2005
The always thoughtful Robert Nagle (a.k.a idiotprogrammer) has just published a detailled and useful review of Digital Video Hacks by Joshus Paul from O’Reilly.
I’ve been meaning to take a look at this book for a while - I’ve thoroughly enjoyed some of the other books in their “hacks ” series. Robert’s review not only waxes enthusiastic about this book, but includes a bunch of useful references and comparisons too.
Nov 08 2005
I just spotted this. The VTEC V-Flash Camera is a regular-sized 128MB USB drive that also includes a still camera, video camera and voice recorder. They are coy about the resolution of the images, but claim it can record 30fps video.
The device spec from the manufacturer can be found at: V Tec - V-Flash Camera, and the best price I have seen is Scan’s “today only” price of £14.95.
As an “always with you” videoblogging capture tool for a next-to-nothing price, this seems hard to beat.
Nov 03 2005
The first “real” non-linear video editor I ever bought was Ulead Media Studio Pro version 2.5. That was back before there were any DV cameras, everyone edited MJPEG AVI files, and the biggest hard drive I could get was a massive 1GB.
Things have come a long way since then, and MSP was lagging behind most of the other players. Adobe Premiere grew in popularity in the medium market and was joined by lots of new products from other competitors. Meanwhile at the low end it became easier and easier for anyone to make a basic workable video editor so they competed on things like “one click” solutions and automatic editing wizards.
Media Studio Pro, unfortunately, lacked the gloss and brand name of the big players, and lacked the hand-holding (and the low price point) of the entry-level solutions. So it lay around with occasional updates to bring it into line with each development in the Windows platform but little else.
Finally, though, with the recent release of Version 8 it has cought up again. If Ulead get it right, with a few small tweaks it could even lead the field in some areas. Ulead have eventually adopted the modern standard “single track editing” rather than the old A/B roll style of earlier versions. The screen layout is smart and tiled and it feels really smooth in use.
They don’t make it very obvious in the manual, but they have also greatly improved the selection of fomats it supports. It will now load the ASF files produced by my small camera and anything else I could find lying around. One problem, though is that it does not yet include sensible MP4 or Quicktime output for devices such as the Play Station Portable and the new video-capable iPod. They claim seamless two-way inter-operation with their entry-level VideoStudio, although I’ve not tried that yet. As I mentioned a few days ago, MP4 output is now a free plugin for VideoStudio, so MP4 export could be as simple as loading a saved MSPproject file into VS and exporting from there. Apparently an MP4 plugin is “coming soon” for MSP itself - with any luck it will include optimised iPod export built in.
As befits a medium tier product it offers a lot of detailed control over the editing process, supporting an arbitrary number of tracks, grouping and including one timeline in another. It also includes supprt for a neat idea they call “templates”. A template is a kind of “fill in the blanks” video effect. Each template comes with its own editing interface which allows you to associate your own video and audio clips and tweak parameters, when you’ve done that it generates a kind of sub-timeline which it includes in your main edit. Very neat and powerful, but limited a bit at the moment as I can’t see any way of anyone other than Ulead creating these things. This is a shame as it seems an ideal base for a thriving third-party plugins market.
I’m currently using the “tryout” version, which is limited in some respects (and expires in a month) but can be upgraded to the full version. This is actually the first tryout version that I’d actually be tempted to buy.
I tried Premiere Pro 1.5 and although it looked lovely it simply did not support the input and output formats I wanted. I tried Vegas 6 but that also had limited IO. Premiere Elements 2.0 looks nice, but the only tryout version is for 1.0 which is not at all what I want.
I’m currently considering whether my budget will stretch to upgrading my old and clunky Ulead Media Studio Pro 6.5 to the hugely better 8.0. I’m very tempted.
Read more at MediaStudio Pro 8 - video editing software
Update I just found another review of this release at eventdv.net.
Oct 29 2005
I don’t know whether this is a limited time offer, or just an attempt to keep the product “fresh”, but I just noticed that Ulead are now offering two great VideoStudio 9 plugins for free. Both used to cost extra, so I never bought them. Now I can read/write MPEG4 and HD video.
The most important thing about this for me is that it now allows me to simply transcode any of my videos into a PSP (and, I hope iPod) compatible mp4 format.
Unfortunately, it’s not all rosy. The new MPEG4 possibilities don’t make it into the options for Quicktime export, so I still can’t use it to make a Quicktime file with MP4a / AAC audio. And no sign of an improved Quicktime export option offering H.264 and iPod options. Even with the latest Quicktime 7 installed.
Apple’s pages claim that the iPod will only play video with AAC audio, but there are a whole lot of Quicktime movies out there that use the likes of IMA or QD audio codecs. Has anyone tried these to see if they work anyway?
Read more at: Video editing software: Ulead VideoStudio - Plug-ins & More
Oct 29 2005
One of my biggest gripes about video editing is the awful file format support from major editing software manufacturers. It seems astonishing to me that top names like Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid/Pinnacle Liquid Edition, Sony Vegas, Ulead Media Studio Pro and so on are so snobby about video formats. How they can advertise themselves as a “step up” from low cost software is simply baffling. For example, none of the above names will read the ASF mpeg4 video files produced my my video camera. I have to stick with supposedly “inferior” products like ArcSoft ShowBiz, Ulead VideoStudio and Serif VideoPlus 4.
Surely supporting extra input formats is easy compared with all the effort they put into UI and internal processing features?
There’s a hint that things may be changing, though. Adobe has just released version 2.0 of “Premiere Elements”, the “baby brother” of their main offering “Premiere Pro”. Apparently this new version of Premiere Elements supports a much wider reange of file formats.
I say apparently because, although they have a “tryout” version available for download, the “tryout” is still version 1.0. I’ll report back when the new version is actually available to try.
Interesting that they have jumped straight to version 2.0, when the heavy hitter “pro” version is still at 1.5. I would not be surprised if we see a new release of “Pro” in a few months, once any bugs have been dealt with in “elements”.
Read more at: Edit digital video, add amazing special effects, personalize DVD menus, and easily burn your masterpiece to DVD