Video editing software & computer power

[shmendrapolk]

I'm new to the world of video editing. I have a mini-DV Sont camcorder and I just switched from using microsoft movie maker to Pinnacle Pro 10.5. I capture the video in mpeg-2 format (DV format takes up way too much space).

I find though that Pinnacle crashes often, behaves sluggishly, and takes a long time to process changes. I'm wondering if my computer is not powerful enough or that pinnacle is just not a great program.

I have a Pentium R(D) 2.8 GHz (dual processor) with 1gb RAM, running Windows ZP Pro. Whle using the software I close everything other application, except for the AV software and Google desktop.
Shouldn't my computer be able to handle MPEG-2 editing?

[JohnnyMalaria]

MPEG2 editing requires a lot of processing power.

Large capacity external hard drives are quite inexpensive these days and you would have a much better editing experience capturing and editing in the DV format....a 300GB drive can hold more than 20 hours of DV format video.

Re Pinnacle - their software is notoriously cr@p....

[shmendrapolk]

I had thought that storing the raw video on an external drive would slow things down due to the slower transfer rate.

Which software would you recommend? I've heard mixed things about Adobe Premiere, and Sony Vegas looked rather complicated. Pinnacle is pretty easy to use.

How much processor power? Do you think getting an additional gig of ram would help? I do shoot some video with my still digital camera (the files are avi, obviously compressed), so I do need to edit those as well & combine them with footage from the mini-dv camcorder.

[communist]

Since I only have used Premiere I can only tell you that for DV only stuff it works ok. For everything else I would *avoid* it. The vendor has this really bad attitude of NOT fixing bugs in current versions but only in costly updates (that seems to be the case for Premiere and After FX at least).
If you can get into Vegas or other programs that will probably be better.

Oh and since DV is *only* 3.5MB/s it works just fine with USB2.0/Firewire ext. hdds.
AMD Athlon XP2000+ / 512-768MB RAM for Premiere Pro 1.51 seemed responsive enough for my taste (and I'm really picky about that laggy feeling if things dont play right away). If you have anything faster than this it should work - Premiere is really a resource hog (for no apparent reason). There are other points against Premiere like price, feature set etc. but for simple editing it is really easy to use and for simple to medium sized projects it works good.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Agreed. Premiere (especially Pro 2.0) is a very competent DV editing system, and it does well with HDV material too, if you have a strong CPU and lot of RAM.

I really think you should switch to editing in DV, for a couple reasons

1) It's not that much bigger than MPEG-2. DV is ~25mbit, and your MPEG-2 is probably around ~10. 40 GB / hour isn't that bad :) Hard drives are SO cheap (500GB for $140 @ Newegg.com last I checked)

2) It's a lot easier, and faster to edit

3) It's better quality, because editing in DV, you keep it in the format the camera records, and then encode the result. Editing in MPEG-2, you have DV->MPEG2->Final Encode in MPEG-2 for DVD or MPEG-4 etc for web / pc

That extra (likely 1 pass) MPEG-2 encode in the middle surely looses some quality.

Another note, combining footage from your digital still camera's video mode with true DV is probably a little tricky :) Most digi-cams record ~ 480p MJPEG, which will need an aspect ratio conversion and interlace to edit clean with DV. Premiere should be able to do this automagically.

~MiSfit

[communist]

Just a small note (dont want to let this turn into a pro/contra Premiere discussion):
it does well with HDV material too, if you have a strong CPU and lot of RAM.
Its absolutely horrible when it comes to HDV. Capturing full tapes will result sometimes in proper sync, sometimes in lost sync (the captured files are in complete sync when played in media players). The developers are aware of this but wont supply a fix for it. One's only hope is that they've fixed it in 3.0. There is also the issue with reencoding the whole clip and their inability to implement a smart-renderer for MPEG2 (re-render the GOP?!).

Most digi-cams record ~ 480p MJPEG, which will need an aspect ratio conversion and interlace to edit clean with DV. Premiere should be able to do this automagically.

I doubt this will happen automagically. Most of the time Premiere will just not import 'exotic' files and reply with its all so cool error message "File format not supported". Which is ok - who in his right mind would want to edit XviD DVD rips anyway? ;)

I just tested it with a DV project, then loaded a 640x480 MJPEG file, importing goes ok but the clip will neither display nor render. This is for 1.51, dont know about 2.0. But I would never let Premiere let this kind of things handle, its resizer has to be seen - truly 'Pro'. In these situations its usually better to get the material in workable format and then bring it into Premiere. You know how it is going to be interpreted and there's no lost control, no unexpected behaviour and other gotchas later down the road.

The only real (but far from compelling) reason to use Premiere is because of its tight integration with other Adobe software - but that is another discussion.

[shmendrapolk]

Thanks for your replies.
I have thus far had no trouble combining the avi files from my still camera and the video footage from the camcorder using pinnacle.
Since I am mostly filming my 4 month old babies, the digital elph is often what's at hand when I need to suddenly film something.
Pinnacle hogs resources too, but it is pretty versatile. A lot of people seem to really dislike it though, but same goes for premiere.