Who?

I've been shooting film and video for as long as I can remember. I used a BBC micro to do video titling in 1983, and bought my first VHS-C camera in 1985, and my first digital stills camera which had video capability in 1999. Since then I've used various technologies to edit the results.

What?

I shoot videos of Bands, Skiing, motorsports, stage work, dance. Just about anything I think will be interesting.

How?

These are the HD cameras I use:

Panansonic x900 - 1080p60 (Japanese version with 64GB of flash)
Panansonic tm700 - 1080p60 (Japanese version with 96GB of flash)
Canon 5D-II - 1080p30
Canon 7D - 1080p30
GoPro HD Hero2 - 1080p30

I usually shoot everything at 1080p, disk space is cheap, and droping the resolution to 720p or 480p is simple (using ffmpeg).
I'm Windows based, and use two video editing packages:

Cyberlink power director 8
Roxio VideoWave 2011

I usually generate DVD and/or Blu-ray versions of the productions.

Cyberlink PowerDirector

I've got The Ulta version 8, they are now upto 10.
I found I had to disable the background file processing, otherwise it would frequently crash. To the point where I bought Roxio instead! I used the information in this CyberLink forum, here is the key:

In PowerDirector
Open the Preference dialogue display.
Edit > Preferences (or Keyboard shortcut Alt+C) > General tab.
Uncheck the option: "Enable file processing...."

Pros:

The video editing is simple and fast
It handles many video/audio formats (including the Canon high bitrate files)
It's slightly faster than Roxio for the video processing.

Cons:

The online download doesn't work very well outside of USA/Europe, I ended up having to contact support for a http link instead of using their terrible download tool.
The DVD layout tool is terrible, it frequently crashes, and will often start processing then report out of disk or out of memory (with 300GB of disc free, and 4GB of Ram on the system).
The upgrades are very limited, they quickly change to the next version, and drop support for the previous versions

Roxio VideoWave

I've got The Roxio Suite 2011. It includes the MyDVD and Burn apps.

Pros:

Very stable
Includes Roxio Burn
MyDVD:
- includes many background screens
- will convert between DVD to BluRay layouts, so creating BluRay and DVD versions of the same project is simple
- Is straight forward and easy to use.

Cons:

Audio from the Canon 5D-II/7D loses sync

ffmpeg

The FFMPEG project is a free video format convertor package.
I use this to sync the audio on the Canon files if I'm editing on Roxio. I also use it to create DVD resolution versions of files if I'm doing a quick edit. I typicaly use the following commands lines:



\tools\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg.exe -i {source file} -async 1 -target ntsc-dvd -ac 2 -ab 128000 -vb 2500000 {dest file}

\tools\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg.exe -i {source file} -async 1 -s hd720 -ac 2 -ab 192000 -vb 6000000 {dest file}

Summary

I use the PowerDirector if I'm using a lot of Canon footage, and use the Roxio MyDVD and Burn tools to do the layout and burning. If there is only one or two shots from the Canon, or I'm not using it's audio, then I use Roxio for the whole process.

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This page was lasted updated on Saturday, 26-May-2012 07:35:27 BST