Sunday, January 21, 2007

Video editing software SUCKS!

I'm a pretty advanced PC user (ahem), but still, I always run into trouble when trying to edit videos.

Everything was fine when the only video I recorded was on my digital camera. It was easy. A video file (AVI) was copied to my computer, and I could edit it using the build-in software Windows XP Movie Maker. After that I could upload it to Utube.
The disadvantage was, that I could only record 5 minutes footage before I had to empty the camera.

Now we bought this cool Sony DVD video camera. I thought everything would be just as easy because it records directly onto a DVD - but boy was I wrong.
I spend the last 3 hours trying to consider different options about PAL, NTSC, 4x3, 19x9, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, framerates, bitrates, layers, non-square pixel rendering, two-pass encodes, etc.

I don't know ANYTHING about the above, and to be honest: I DON'T CARE!!!

Where's the software with a button that says:

"I'll now read your DVD, allow you to cut out the scenes you don't want and then I'll upload it for you! I should be done in about half an hour, go read a book while your waiting! Thanks for buying Sony."

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Dan,
You should define your goals in video editing in more clear way?

Are you trying to convert video into MPEG2 or DivX format? Are you trying to cut some video fragment? Are you applying some transition effects?

I love VideoDub

Unknown said...

I am sorry, posted comment too soon.

Last sentence from my previous post - "I love VideoDub" is useless :)

Dan Kjaergaard said...

there you go again... MPEG-2 or DivX - who cares? As a user all that matters is VIDEO!

Unknown said...

I am sorry, but there are different compression algorithms created independently in a different parts of the world.

AFAIK there is not single best multipurpose "fits it all" compression algorithm yet created.

DivX compression is quite popular, at least in the part of the world named Ukraine :)