DV in Windows Movie Maker

[SimonSez07]

i have recently switched from using premiere 6.5 (buggy and complicated) to Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker 2.0 because of how easy it is to capture, edit and export.

only one problem, it seems i cannot capture dv, edit it (no transitions or effects) and put it back on the camera with out recompressing. i also tried saving it, but again, it recompresses the video.

as far as i can tell there is no way to do lossless editing like in premiere. if anyone knows how, that would be great. i think movie maker is a great tool for capturing dv, editing, and saving in some format like windows media for streaming or something, but if i cant do lossless edits, ill use a different application.

on that note, what is a good reliable, powerful, and user-friendly program for editing dv?? i have given up on premiere, but i was thinking maybe ulead videostudio might be a winner. it might be worth a try.

thanks for your help

- simon

[OvERaCiD23]

I'm assuming you didn't shell out the cash for Premiere 6.5 if you're just thinking about not using it (it doesn't come cheap!). That said (and you violating some forum rules in the process), try Ulead Media Studio. Windows Movie Maker is a giant piece of crap, no way around it. I'm not sure on the recompressing part, I never got far enough into the program to export my video. I'm sure you can just export it to tape though with no recompression, as what would be the point of a DV editing program without that feature?

[Dali Lama]

@OvERaCiD23

Premiere 6.5 comes in a demo version. Maybe he/she was using that?

Its better not to pass judgement without full knowledge,

Dali

[SimonSez07]

thank you dali.

i made no statements pertaining to software piracy or in violation to any rules. please take me at my words and read nothing into it. i will show you the same courtesy.

with that said and to get back to topic, im not sure if you are refering to the [very buggy] version 1 of movie maker, but i do like the interface and functionality of movie maker 2.0 however, i also do not see the point of a DV editing program that cannot export back to tape with no recompression but, believe me, i have spent much time trying to find this feature and it seems not to be possible. please prove me wrong and let me know how to do it.

gratiously

-simon

ps - what is the difference between media studio and video studio?

[bb]

I haven't played around much with Windows MovieMaker 2, and my camcorder doesn't have DV-in, so all I can contribute so far is this link (probably doesn't help any further):
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/moviemaker/learnmore/backtocam.asp

Ulead's VideoStudio is a low-cost beginners program with limited editing capabilities, wheras MediaStudio Pro is a full-featured editor you can compare with Adobe's Premiere. You can get information at www.ulead.com and download trials.

bb

[steve_g]

Pinnacle Studio 8 is similar to WMM in interface terms, i.e. easy to cpature, edit, auto-detect scenes etc. It is way easier than premier (also less powerful, but if you don't need the features...).
It can save back in DV format without compression.

[SimonSez07]

thanks steve_g

i am downloading the trial version to test it out, but it seems this is exactly what im looking for.

-simon

[DDogg]

See this link for a free copy of PowerDirector that FredThompson posted:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=48762

[seunosewa]

How did you find out that Windows Movie Maker 2 recompresses unchanged DV frames when exporting to tape? I'd like to know.

[coordz]

For what it's worth here's my experience of Movie Maker 2. I captured a load of DV from camera which went fine, then dragged the clips to the timeline without transitions. Exporting to file gave an exact stream copy of the original capture. I can't imagine why Movie Maker would re-compress when exporting to camera but if it does then export to a file and then send that over to your camera as is.

[seunosewa]

Exporting to file gave an exact stream copy of the original capture.
How did you confirm that, exactly?

[Southstorm]

WMM will do DV output. You just have to search through the settings.

[seunosewa]

How do you confirm that they are exactly the same?

[JohnnyMalaria]

I can guarantee you that they are exactly the same.

Here are the reasons that support the claim...

I put a 45 second DV clip on the timeline and then saved the movie as DV. It took 23 seconds.

I added +bright/-bright effects to the clip and saved it. It took 87 seconds.

Just making a copy of the file in Windows Explorer took 15 seconds.

The original file had date/time information in it. If the new file still has it then the frames are identical because when WMM creates completely new frames they have no date/time. The first case above still has the date/time, the second doesn't (I used our software to confirm this).

If you have our DV decoder and want to add date/time using WMM, you have to force WMM to render new frames (using the +bright/-bright trick for example) otherwise the new file has no date/time. Since our decoder is the DV decoder used, it proves that WMM simply copies the original frames when no effects/transitions are occurring.

Finally, if you really want to(!), open both in a hex editor, located the first frame and compare the next 120000 bytes in each. An NTSC DV frame is 120000 bytes.

[coordz]

How did you confirm that, exactly?
I imported a DV tape from camera, dragged all the clips onto the timeline and then exported to DV file. I then took 4 frames from the original AVI and 4 frames from the exported version, decompressed and compared. These frames were identical. JohnnyMalaria has gone into more details above.

[seunosewa]

I imported a DV tape from camera, dragged all the clips onto the timeline and then exported to DV file. I then took 4 frames from the original AVI and 4 frames from the exported version, decompressed and compared. These frames were identical. JohnnyMalaria has gone into more details above.

In other words they were visually identical, right?. I wouldn't trust this approach because it might simply imply that the degradation of the image is too minute to be seen within one generation.

However, I would trust JohnnyMlaria's approach. Thanks guys.

[coordz]

@seunosewa

LOL I compared the images bytewise, of course ;). RMS error of zero, SSD of zero, however way you want to look at it.

[seunosewa]

Nice! Thanks a million for the info.

[coordz]

Has anyone tried using Movie Maker to send the original DV back to the camcorder, recapturing the DV and compared that recaptured DV to the originally captured DV? (you know what I mean....) I'd be interested to know is SimonSez07's recompression problems were due to the Movie Maker config or if the DV is really recompressed when going back to tape.

[dbzgundam]

I had a terrible caching issue with Premiere Pro 2 actually; due to technical issues (and impatience), I used WMM to capture my DV files, but found that Premiere locked up after trying to cache the files.

The problem I found was that they was AVI Type 1 files, whereas Premiere only accepts Type 2 (or likes to work with them anyway).

You can easily change this by separating the audio and video in Vdub and then muxing them back together into a Type 2. Irrelevant to this discussion I know (I have no idea on the recompression as I'm often putting my video through several programs anyway), but keep it in mind if you lock up.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Has anyone tried using Movie Maker to send the original DV back to the camcorder, recapturing the DV and compared that recaptured DV to the originally captured DV? (you know what I mean....) I'd be interested to know is SimonSez07's recompression problems were due to the Movie Maker config or if the DV is really recompressed when going back to tape.

It would be rather pointless.

WMM creates an edited DV AVI file. This contents of this file are sent to the camcorder which records a bit-for-bit identical copy. Recapturing it will create a bit-for-bit copy of the DV that is on the tape. In effect, all you have done is use the camcorder as a glorified back-up device!

You need not worry about whether the unedited portions of a DV video are recompressed by WMM or not. They aren't. The whole compressed DV frame is copied as-is to the output file.

[jmnk]

I'm not sure if this question belongs here - but here's anyway. How do I use custom profiles in Windows Movie Maker 6.0 running on Vista? I've read that I should be able to create profiles (or copy those from WMM 2.x on windows XP) and put those in 'c:\program files\movie maker\shared\profiles' directory. I did that - and for the life of me I can't seem to be able to see them when I try to publish movie. Any pointers?

[wayback]

You need not worry about whether the unedited portions of a DV video are recompressed by WMM or not. They aren't. The whole compressed DV frame is copied as-is to the output file.

Can I just pin you down on this?

Lets say I bring a DV file in from the camcorder, divide it into clips manually, assemble some of them into a movie with 2-second fade transitions between the clips, and add a fade-in-from-black at the beginning, and a fade-out-to-black at the end, but do not make any other changes to the body of each clip, and then save the new video to a DV file, then WMM will simply pass through, without re-rendering, everything in the original clips except the few seconds involved in the transitions and fade-in/out. Right?

I haven't been able to find a Microsoft source confirming that, but if you tell me you're sure, I'll go with it. :-)

[JohnnyMalaria]

Right!

[wayback]

Well, something doesn't look right. In the output DV, there is a quality loss in comparison to the original DV, and it looks like it has been deinterlaced - I see those artifacts that aren't in the original. And perhaps reinterlaced - Gspot says it's still interlaced. So WMM must doing something it shouldn't. Is there anything else I can use that's free? I guess I could even use VirtualDub to edit, but I don't remember seeing fades there.

Edit: See next message. It's not as bad as I thought.

[wayback]

Ok, I think I found the problem. Generally, it only re-renders the transitions. But if you have a Video Effect on a clip, it re-renders that entire clip. And fade-in-from-black and fade-out-to-black are not transitions - they are video effects. In my test DV, I only had one break in the middle, so it ended up re-rendering the whole damned thing because both clips had video effects.

So I re-split it so there are separate short clips (a few seconds) at the very beginning and end which the fade-in and fade-out video effects are applied to. It appears the re-rendering is then limited to just those few seconds.