Editing HD - pleasant experience!

[samirkharusi]

I think I have finally found a pleasant HD video editor and perhaps I'd better share it with you guys. I shoot my home videos on a Canon HV20 and what comes out of the camera is beautiful, though when the light is low, eg indoors, you get better quality with cheaper SD cameras. Anyway I would highly recommend the Canon HD offerings.

Editing: my previous experiences with a packaged Sony editor were painful. Frequent crashes and interminably slow to move clips, enter transitions, etc. Rendering was an overnight job. With my foray into HD I also got myself a new PC with a quad processor, 4GB ram, dual hard drives, fast video display card, etc. No excuses. But I was till apprehensive with rendering HD edited versions. I have been trying out Sony Vegas Platinum. It actually works, provided you do not try rendering to wmv or any compression beyond mpeg2. My first trial to wmv at 1080 took 6x as long to render as the length of the video! Half hour video takes 3 hours! And I ended up with a slight yellowish cast and also the black point shifted to grey. Noticeable loss in quality. But when I tried to render using mpeg2 to m2t the rendering did not take much longer than the video itself. Fantastic! I also downrezzed the video to SD for putting on a normal DVD for a friend and it does not take much longer to render than the length of the video either. Quality of the m2t at 1080 looks close, if not identical, to the original, and the SD DVD is also very good. To run Vegas Platinum at HD 1080 you also need to download the latest version of WMP (Windows Media Player ver 11). Then everything works great. Only problem is the huge 1080 m2t files. Currently I can store them on a hard drive to watch on a PC or on a DV tape to replay through the Canon HV20 camera. Thought I'd share a pleasant experience for a change.

[samirkharusi]

Another pleasant experience, for storing and playback of those massive 12GB per hour m2t (mpeg2) files: I finally managed to set up my PC as a functioning media server to my Sony Playstation 3 via my home LAN. The PS3 is at the other end of the house, so I decided that a Cat5 wired connection would work more reliably than wireless. No reason not to use wireless if you have excellent wireless connectivity. Main breakthrough was to abandon trying to use Windows Media Player as the server. Don't waste your time trying to do the same. Just download TwonkyMedia and the set-up is an instant, pleasant breeze. Highly recommended. Now just leave the m2t files on your PC hard drive and all your home HD videos (and music, and photos) become instantly available from the PS3 to play at full glory on your giant TV. The PS3 has an excellent slide show routine for your photos and your HD videos come through onto your giant screen at full 1080.

I am surprised that Sony does not highlight this great ability of the PS3 in their ads so that they sell more of them to non-gamers like myself. Only reason I bought it was for the kids, and my friends got it because of word-of-mouth that it's a cost effective player for BluRay disks. I presume that Apple users already have solutions. It's us PC diehards who need something close to plug and play. The PS3 and TwonkyMedia is the closest I have found so far. PS: your firewall settings may block your PS3 from hooking up to your PC. Something to check if your PS3 does not "see" the PC.

[jjj]

I have been trying out Sony Vegas Platinum.[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=177169\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

This is a great tool, bought out by Sony a few years back and they've completely fail to market it. You still get the awful Premiere if you buy a Sony Laptop instead of Vegas, their own, way superior products.
A few years back I gave a demo version to a producer I was working with, as he had to edit a wedding for some friends. His verdict - including installing Vegas, learning how to use it and produce the finished product, took half the time it would have taken him on Premiere - a package he already knew very well.

The main reason it is so nice to use is that Sonic Foundry who designed it, based Vegas on the very good audio packages they do, rather than other clumsy video packages. Much easier than FC to learn and use.
It's also the Dog's Bollox when it comes to sound , unsurprisingly.