Making your own movies on your PC is now faster, easier, and more affordable than you might imagine.When we decided to look at video capture boards, the brief put to vendors was simply to supply a -card" that could be fitted to a PC to both capture and output at least VCR quality video. The card had to come bundled with video editing software that at least provides the rudimentary tools that a home user would needâ€"that is, the ability to add titles, music tracks and voiceover. And, of course, we can't forget the obligatory transition effects between scene changes (even the most modest -director" wants to place his or her artistic stamp on the final product in the form of at least a simple cross dissolve). Most often, users new to the process will search through the transitions for the most bizarre ones they can find.

The products tested ranged from an inexpensive AU$299 all the way up to AU$2,404. And, yes, we found that the price did usually reflect the quality of the product. For most home users, almost any of the low-priced products will probably be adequate to provide hours of editing fun. I personally own a Matrox G400 Marvel and while I looked on in envy at the video quality of some of the more expensive products I am nevertheless happy with the Matrox as its output quality is great for dubbing to a VCR and sending to relatives.

The software provided with the cards also had a wide range of features from very basic programs such as Avid Cinema and Ulead's VideoStudio all the way up to Adobe Premiere (a package that is so powerful a lot of professionals only utilise a fraction of its feature set). We have included a short comparison of two leading productsâ€"Adobe Premiere 5.1c and Ulead MediaStudio Pro 5.2â€"in a sidebar. Also, where more than one product came with the same software editing package, our comments are provided in separate sections to save writing the same things over and over again.

ASUS V7700 GeForce2 GTS Deluxe

There is absolutely no denying that the V7700 is an extremely potent 3D graphics accelerator card and the Deluxe variant has a swag of additional features above and beyond pumping games graphics from your PC to your monitor. Yes, the V7700 does include video capture and output capabilities (meeting the requirements for this comparison) but more of these in a moment. The card is also configured to deliver true 3D graphics with the supplied 3D LCD glasses so you can play your favourite games and literally have the monsters appear to jump out of the screen at you. I must admit I do have one of these on an earlier variant of the ASUS GeForce card and while it's a great novelty, I decided my eyesight was perhaps a tad more important. I am yet to find anyone who can wear the glasses for a protracted period of time and not develop tired eyes and a headache.

The AGP card is reasonably large with 32MB of DDR display memory, a large circular heatsink, and fan assembly on the accelerator chip. Video capture appears to be accomplished by a small Chrontel chip on the card, and it is the most basic video capture of all the products tested. External connectors include VGA, VR Out (for the 3D glasses), composite video output (RCA), S-video output and because of a lack of space, a combined composite/S-video input. The latter is a 7-pin DIN plug but the ASUS is provided with a short conversion lead that terminates in an RCA socket for composite video, a composite video fly lead, and an S-video fly lead are also supplied.

The software bundle includes four CDs with the drivers, capture utility, DVD software player, Ulead VideoStudio 4 and various utilities including a digital VCR and a Video Security program to name but two. The latter is an interesting utility as it allows the user to hook up a camera to the card, and only if the scene changes does the PC capture the image to disk. So in a static room, for example, the software will grab images if an intruder enters. The Digital VCR is very simple to operate and we used this and the Live utility to capture our video clips for the test. Installation was simple and the small 86-page manual does a good job outlining the installation of the hardware, software and the operation, in brief, of the supplied utilities. We found Ulead's VideoStudio to be a little more flaky on the V7700 than some of the other cards tested, but the application does provide the novice with a simple and easy way to carry out basic video editing.

The quality of the captured video was quite poor and the output quality was even worseâ€"all the other analogue cards tested were superior in terms of their video quality. The captured files of this card were quite good in terms of colour saturation but the definition was the real letdown, looking more like videotape that was several generations down the line from the original.

In reality the V7700 Deluxe is a kick-ass graphics card, and that is what you should be buying it for, it's just an added bonus that you can dabble in some video capture and editing at the same time.

ATI All-In-Wonder 128 Pro

Three of the products evaluated included an integrated 2D/3D graphics accelerator, or perhaps we should say they were graphics cards that included video capture and editing facilities. Quite acceptable 2D and 3D graphics acceleration is provided by an ATI Rage 128 Pro graphics processor coupled with 32MB of display memory, and a Rage Theatre chip is also responsible for ATI's -high-quality video output", to quote the vendor.

The AGP 4x card is small despite the large 125-channel TV tuner that gobbles quite a large chunk of the board space. A rather neat function of the tuner software provided is the ability to recognise -hot words" in the live program and notify the user.

The ATI is certainly not short on I/O; there are a pair of internal audio connectors, line-in, and line-out. The idea here is to plug your DVD directly into the card to provide high quality audio output at the ATI card, simplifying the connection of TVs and VCRs to your PC, some of the cards we have seen in the past require the sound to be sourced from the sound card instead. The line out then plugs into your sound card so the DVD is effectively -passed through" the ATI.

External connector space is pretty limited on the back plane of a card so ATI has -condensed" the functionality into a number of non-standard ports and supplied appropriate adaptor cables to sort out the signals. It's almost impossible to mix up the inputs and the outputs as the purple input cable has a small connection box at the end with S-video and RCA composite and audio inputs. This contrasts to the black output cable, which is just that, a cable that splits into an S-video plug, RCA composite plug and (unfortunately) a 3.5mm stereo audio plug. I say unfortunately because every VCR and camera I have seen has RCA audio inputs and so do most video dubbing cables. In general, the cables are short and terminate in female connectors and because most of us don't happen to have an S-video or composite video fly lead, these are also supplied in the package. There is an aerial input for the tuner and of course a D-sub connector for your VGA monitor.

Installing the ATI is relatively painless, after the card is detected by Windows 98, simply inserting the driver CD gets the ball rolling to the extent that all the capture utilities and the like are installed in one hit. Ulead VideoStudio 4 of course is a separate install but of VideoStudio's many shortcomings the very simple installation is not one of them.

While not earth-shattering in their scope the two ATI manuals, -Installation and Setup Users Guide" and -Multimedia Centre Users Guide" are certainly far superior to any of the other -all-in-one" cards we tested. The manuals are clearly laid out with good diagrams and easy-to-follow instructions and descriptions. Ulead's documentation on the other hand, is online and at each step of the way during production of your -movie", a small dialog box pops up to explain, in a very abbreviated way, how to proceed. Supplied software, of course, includes capture and output utilities including ATI's Multimedia Centre which functions as a CD player, digital VCR and DVD player for example.

Ulead VideoStudio 4 is a very simple video editing utility on par with the Avid Cinema supplied with the Matrox Marvel for example. A more complete description of the product can be found in the VideoStudio sidebar. It is worth mentioning, however, that we found the VideoStudio software to be very -flaky" on our test system, and even when we resorted to an Intel PIII 866MHz system with a CC820 motherboard and clean basic installation of Windows 98SE and the ATI drivers, VideoStudio still behaved badly.

Output quality of the ATI was quite good when compared with the other analogue capture cards, it was of course no match for the more expansive products from Pinnacle, but was on par with the Matrox and definitely superior to the ASUS. Colour was good for its ilk, pale naturally when compared to the vivid DV products, but then analogue transfer by its very nature both to and from the card is a -lossy" process. The image definition was quite good, again, a slight loss when compared to the original, but nothing too dramatic.

Matrox Marvel G400-TV

The Marvel G400 is certainly no newcomer to the Lab, I originally purchased a Marvel G200 a couple of years back and upgraded earlier this year to the G400 incarnation.

The medium-sized AGP card, in common with the ATI and ASUS we tested, is a combination of graphics card and video capture card. The Matrox G400 accelerator chip, fitted with a very robust heat sink, and 16MB of display memory provides graphics grunt and a Zoran ZR36060 chip takes care of the bulk of the video tasks. At first glance, the dearth of external connectors (there are only two of them) is a bit worrying. Both are D-sub connectors, one a standard VGA connector and the other a 26-pin connector that, with a quite large -snake-like" cable, connects to an external video breakout box. The Marvel cable also includes a pair of 3.5mm line-in and line-out audio connectors that link the breakout box to your sound cardâ€"the Marvel does not appear to provide native audio processing, instead it relies on your sound card.

The large breakout box includes S-video and composite video in and out with the latter accompanied by a pair of RCA audio in and out ports. A pair of patch cables for composite video/audio is provided to hook the Marvel up to your camera or VCR video in and video out ports. Another feature of the break out box is the inclusion of a TV tuner with an antenna cable connection, which allows the user to watch TV and grab images on the fly.

The installation process is a doddle thanks to the large fold-out, double-sided installation guide that is around the size of three A3 sheets and includes step-by-step installation with very clear diagrams. The Users Guide looks a substantial size until you discover it covers five languages and so only 31 pages are devoted to English. As a consequence it only covers the installation process in more detail. All other documentation is online.

Four software CDs ship with the Matrox, the installation CD includes a DVD player, the native capture and playback software that also functions as your TV Tuner -remote control" and an LSX MPEG2 software transcoder. The latter is provided to convert the native hardware compressed MJPEG format to MPEG2, which is considerably more space efficient but requires your CPU to carry out the transfer to MPEG2. Other software includes the game Tonic Trouble, Ulead's Photo Express 2 and Avid Cinema V1.0.

Avid Cinema is a basic video editing program, and it is very easy to use. The program layout is logical with four main -tabbed" sections from Storyboard through to Finish Movie for your final output. Novices can simply follow the tabs in order and at the end of the exercise will have produced a video that can be output to a VCR, or the Web, for example.

Editing is pretty minimalâ€"for example, we could clip the ends from a video clip but could find no way to break the clip into sub clips and reorder the pieces, you must import the clips as small segments if you wish to have the flexibility to swap scene order. The clips are all placed in a single video line on the timeline with a transition field, voiceover field and music field located below. Unfortunately, you cannot edit the clip's audio track either, but a voiceover and musical accompaniment can be included in the project. There is a good range of transitions and they are very easy to insert and implement. For Avid Cinema, the bottom line is that the program should be adequate for the novice user that simply wants to patch a couple of clips together with a transition or two and a title. If you want to do anything more flash than this then you will have to purchase a more upmarket software package.

When we unfairly compare the quality of the capture file and final edited output to the IEEE1394 based cards, the Matrox looks a bit paleâ€"literally. The colour saturation is quite low compared to the vivid, but realistic, final product from the DV cards. However when compared against the other -non-DV" cards, the Matrox actually stacks up quite well and was actually preferred over ATI's output and is literally streets ahead of the ASUS. It may not have hardware MPEG2 but it was far more stable on both the systems we installed the card and software on, when compared to the ATI.

Pinnacle DC30 Plus

The DC30 Plus is a large PCI MJPEG analogue capture card. The card is liberally sprinkled with video processing chips from Zoran, Miro and Micronas, and natively supports audio capture and playback with an Analogue Device chipset. The card provides internal connectors for composite video in and out as well as audio in and out. The five external connectors include input and output for both composite and S-video with RCA and 4-pin DIN connectors respectively. The fifth connector is an 8-pin DIN socket for the audio, but before you start worrying about sourcing such a weird audio cable, rest assured the entire rear panel of the card connects to a breakout box that conveniently sits on your desktop and provides RCA connectors for composite and audio and the standard S-video sockets.

Given the exemplary documentation that is supplied with all the Pinnacle products installation is not a nail-biting chore. The User's guide very clearly describes the installation process of both the hardware and software and includes clear diagrams where necessary. As with other Pinnacle products that supply Adobe Premiere and Photoshop LE as part of your kit, it is best to install Premiere first so you can direct the card's plug-ins to the correct location. Utilities are provided to test your system to ensure your new card is correctly installed and supported, you can even perform a speed test on your hard drives to make sure they are up to scratch.

In addition to Premiere, the card also includes TitleDeko to liven up the titling capabilities of Premiere, and Pixelan SpiceRack which provides 300 classy images to add spice to Premiere's gradient wipe. There is a separate User's Guide provided for TitleDeko that should get you up to speed quickly and of course Premiere is supplied with a large novel-sized tome.

We utilised the DC30's basic tools to capture and export our video and they proved easy to use and well behaved, the whole process ran without a hitch.

The quality of the DC30's video capture was certainly the best of all the analogue-only cards and was not all that inferior to the DV cards. The colours were stronger and less washed out than the competition, particularly the -all-in-one" cards. While image definition was good it naturally could not compete with the DV cards in this respect. Compression artefacts on our test file were few and far between but in certain circumstances (for example, around the curved body moulding of a car), there was some -staircasing" along the edges.

Pinnacle DV 500

If size matters, then the DV500 wins hands down. It's about the length of the -all-in-one" cards, the largest of the products tested, but also includes a -piggy-back" daughterboard. The daughterboard appears to provide at least some of the DV functionality as it includes TI's 1394 controller chip. Video capture and compression are provided by Philips, Intel and C-Cube chips while the native audio tasks are offloaded to a Crystal CS4231A chip.

The DV500 does not lack I/O ports with one internal and two external IEEE1394 (Firewire) ports for direct connection to a DV camera equipped with an IEEE1394 port. This simple and fast connection allows the download of video and audio in digital format from the camcorder. Also present on the back of the card is a D-Sub connector for the expansion box that includes input and output ports for S-video, composite video and analogue audioâ€"the latter two are the standard RCA-style connectors.

Installing the plug and play PCI card was a breeze. Although, if you are a tad cavalier in your attitude to reading installation manuals, you may miss the suggestion that the supplied Adobe Premiere software must be installed before the DV500 and driver software is installed. We tried to be a bit perverse and installed in the wrong order to see what would happen, but as long as you have the same installation directory for Premier specified during both the Adobe installation and driver installation, we found it still all worked fine. The software bundled with the card is extensive and of a high quality including full versions of Adobe Premiere 5.1, Adobe Photoshop 5 LE, Sonic Foundry Acid Music, Minerva Impression 2 (video authoring), TitleDeko and Hollywood FX Copper version 4. We found Acid Music quite useful, enabling us to compose our own music to dub onto our final video product, TitleDeko proved useful creating our end credits, Hollywood FX and SpiceRack are Premiere plug-ins that supply an extra swag of digital effects.

The basic DV500 tools provide a simple interface to configure, capture and output your video masterpiece. DV Device Control is a small VCR-style interface that controls your DV camcorder with the click of a mouse, it is a simple task to search for your clip and then click the single record button and the camcorder starts playback and the video begins saving to disk. What could be simpler? The User's Guide outlines the general functionality of the hardware; DV500 video tools and has chapters covering the operation of the tools, TitleDeko and SpiceRack. The guide is clearly written with plenty of accurate diagrams and a detailed index and glossary at the back. Minerva Impression and Hollywood FX are supplied with their own small manuals and both manuals are quite detailed. The 393-page Premiere User's Guide is the most impressive tome and includes a very helpful tutorial section as well as detailed descriptions of the software's functionality.

It comes as no surprise, given the pricing of the unit, that the capture and output quality of the DV500 in DV mode is excellent, with vivid colour and great definition. We also tried a very quick grab using the analogue inputs of the card. The quality, while definitely not up to the DV capture, was very good, certainly on par with the other analogue Pinnacle products and visibly superior to the -all-in-one" cards.

Pinnacle Studio DC10 Plus

The simplest way to describe the DC10 Plus is that it is a cut-down version of the DC30 Plus. As a result, the PCI card is smaller and includes fewer components and features. Significantly, the native audio facilities of the DC30 are not present, instead the card relies on the PC's sound card to capture and output audio. This simplifies connectivity, from the card's point of view anyway, with a pair of internal composite video connectors for input and output and external connectors run to input and output for both composite and S-video in the usual form factors.

Installation is about as painless as you can get under Windows. A large slab of the manual is taken up by the operation of the supplied video editing software called Studio. Software supplied with the card includes a couple of Pinnacle's capture and video test utilities and the previously mentioned editing software. For a description of the functionality of this easy to use package see the sidebar. The card's video quality was every bit as good as the DC30 with strong colours, good definition and if anything, slightly less in the way of MJPEG compression artefacts.

Pinnacle Studio DV

If you are looking for the lowest-cost Pinnacle entry into DV editing then the Studio DV is for you. And, as far as packaging and software are concerned, the Studio DV is nigh on identical to the Studio DC10 Plusâ€"just DV versus analogue. The only major difference is that the Studio DV card does not include some of the Pinnacle utilities and tools that ship with the Studio DC10.

The card itself is tiny, barely the length of the PCI slot and, in places, around half the height. But then all it has to accommodate are a pair of TI IC's and a sprinkling of other components. I/O is pretty typical when compared to the other DV cards tested, with a single internal IEEE1394 port, two external ports and a standard cable provided to hook up the card to your camcorder.

Installation was quick and easy and the supplied User's Guide more than adequately covers this process and the operation of the Studio editing software. One of the utilities that the Studio DV does include allows the user to select which DV IEEE1394 driver to use, either Microsoft's or the one specifically written for the TI chipset. The editing software provided was Studio DV and you can find a more in-depth description of its operation in the sidebar. We should note, however, that the Studio DV card did not work as seamlessly with the software as the Studio DC10. It took a couple of attempts to capture our video clips, the capture would inexplicably stop part way through without the system hanging, despite using the TI drivers as recommended by Pinnacle.

Video quality was as good as any of the other DV cards because the card itself does not interfere or alter the digital data stream in any way. Colours were rich with very good definition.

Swann Firewire VideoWorks Pro DV

Swann's Firewire is a tiny PCI card featuring three external IEEE1394 ports. And, although the card we were supplied with was based on the Texas Instruments chipset, the new product will probably feature a Lucent chipset instead. It should be stressed that this is a digital video board only, and a very reasonably priced one at that; if you need analogue inputs look somewhere else.

The package comes complete with a two-metre IEEE1394 camcorder cable and, to our surprise, a set of stereo headphones complete with small headset mic. This is just the ticket for connecting to your soundcard to add voiceovers to your clip or viewing your results without disturbing the household.

Installing the card was very simple. No special video Firewire drivers are necessaryâ€"in contrast to the DV-200, for exampleâ€"the drivers are standard Windows 98 IEEE1394 drivers. There is a surprising amount of software provided with the Swann given its low price point. For newbie video directors, there is Ulead's VideoStudio DV 4.

Capturing a clip is pretty easy although we did experience some problems with compatibility and our Sony camera but, as previously mentioned, this appears to be a problem with Sony's -iLink" implementation of IEEE1394 because a Panasonic we used worked without a hitch. All this meant was that the program's capture and output functions could not directly control the camera. In fact, we had to resort to using the Panasonic to store our final movie but given the quality of the two cameras, this did not interfere in our output quality assessment. Output quality was very good with rich colours, certainly superior to the quality of the results for non-IEEE1394 based systems (although we did notice some slight artefacts when compared to the output from MainActor, for example).

For the more advanced, or if you aspire to more editing power than Video-Studio can provide, then give MainActor a try, also bundled with the Swann. MainActor is actually a suite of programs and we found that we only needed to use three of the modules, Capture, Sequencer, and Output. Those familiar with Premier's layout and logic should find MainActor Sequencer relatively easy to come to grips with. Obviously there are some niggling little details that may throw you off the scent at first. For example, the trim tool appeared to not work at all. We would line up the time line to the frame boundary we wished to cut and the trim tool would not work (we then found that the tool would only make cuts a quarter of a second or more from the marker).

MainActor does have a very good range of transition effects and is quite strong when it comes to adding titles to your work. 3D text can be created quite simply and rendered and -flown" across the display for a professional look. We did have the occasional crash from the program but then Premiere is pretty darn shaky itself so we really could not complain too much. Capture and output quality were excellent and although we could not directly control the Sony, our Panasonic stand-in proved to work fine; we were able to manually operate the Sony to record and capture. The final results showed very good colour depth and we found the text renders were cleaner than those produced by Ulead. We did not detect any of the compression artefacts that were present on the Ulead output.

The software kit does not end with the two video editing programs, the Swann also shipped with SuperGoo, a real-time morphing tool, Kai's PhotoSoap2, image editing software, and a neat CD called VideoWorks that graphically takes the novice through the whole process from creating a storyboard to the final output of the finished movie.

If we had to complain about any aspect of the package it would be the documentation. Admittedly, installation is quite simple and the Ulead product, for example, includes live online documentation. However, a novice may be intimidated by the simple photocopied pages outlining the installation and the three-page quick start guide. MainActor is supplied with a 114-page manual but it is not a patch on the Premiere manual, for example, and could do with improvement in both content and layout.

It is worth noting that if you already have editing software that you are familiar with and wish to continue using, Swann have a Starter Kit that does not include MainActor which will only set you back $199.

Comparing the Included Software

Once a clip is imported you can trim either end but you cannot, for example, cut it in half and move the sections around. This more or less forces the user to capture a large clip to be edited in smaller blocks or logical scenes that can be shuffled around. There does not appear to be any way to edit the audio that was captured with your clips, but you can add a single voiceover and music track to the project.

Transitions are added between clips and there is a very good range of spiffy effects that worked wellâ€"as soon as you add a transition to the timeline, the program renders it to give you a preview of your handy work. Capturing a clip is pretty easy, as is the output to the camera, or at least it should be.

We found this product to be the least stable of all the editing software supplied with the cards, even when compared to Adobe Premiere, and that's saying something. This is a bit of a worry considering it appears to be the predominant supplied product in the lower-priced cards although we have been led to believe that there are some incremental upgrades in the wings that should remedy the problems.

Render times in Ulead were on par with MainActor and Premiere. Output quality was obviously dependent on the capture quality of the card it was driving but when we compared the quality of VideoStudio and MainActor, both were supplied with the Swann DV card, we found the only real difference was slightly more compression artefacts but nothing severe.

Pinnacle Studio
Studio is rather unusual, when compared to the other editors on offer in this roundup, in that it sits somewhere between the low-end Ulead VideoStudio and Adobe Premiere. To be fair, it is probably closer to the low-end than Premiere, but it does have some distinct advantages over the lower products. The most obvious is its ability to cut up a large clip into several smaller ones, each can then be trimmed individually.

Unfortunately, you cannot change the order, but at least it's a step up from the low-end Avid and Ulead software. The layout of the display is simple and easy to follow but perhaps does not quite hold the user's hand as much as the other previously mentioned products. For a start there are only three buttons across the top of the displayâ€"Capture, Edit, and Make Movie. Capturing, particularly with the Studio DV card, is pretty neat with the software happily controlling the camcorder with a click of the mouse button.

The timeline in edit mode is very similar to Cinema and VideoStudio with the movie clip line followed by, title, audio and finally the music line. The program will display the first frame of each clip but we were unable to display all the frames in the timeline. To edit the timeline there is a toolbox icon that accesses various tools such as a WAV recorder for your voiceover and a title overlay tool. Above the timeline is the preview window and a spiral bound tabbed -workbook" that contains sample audio clips, titles and a host of rather -groovy" transitions.

The operation is easy. For example, to place a transition between two clips it's as easy as dragging and dropping the transition in the correct location on the timeline. If you have installed transitions and titles, like all the other programs in this group, the movie must be rendered before it can be output to the VCR or camcorder. The render process was not quite a quick as Premiere but was certainly an improvement on Avid's Cinema.

A Look at Editing Packages

For this article I will present my experiences using two digital video editing (DVE) products: Adobe's Premiere (version 5.1) and Ulead's Media Studio Pro (version 5.2). In both cases, I have run the applications on Windows 98 platforms and whilst I have not come anywhere near exhausting the features of either package, I have experienced enough to make some comments about the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Adobe Premiere

Having come to Premier after having used Ulead's Media Studio Pro, it was encouraging to see the familiar -timeline" display with both video and audio tracks presented on the screen. Premier allows the editor to have up to 99 video tracks and 99 audio tracks in a project. This allows you to achieve layered video effects (such as overlaying titles and stills as well as other video tracks) and sound-on-sound effects so that music, sound effects and narrations can be incorporated into a project. Video tracks can be displayed as a -filmstrip", where tiny thumbnails represent the frames that exist in a particular section of film. Alternatively, the user can select to show the filename only for each track, or the filename together with the first and last frame of each track. I personally prefer to view my video tracks as filmstrips. This can take a little longer to refresh on the screen when changes are made. With audio tracks, you have to ability to either show the waveform or not to show it.

With video editing, there are two key video tracks that are used to assemble a project. In Premiere, these are labelled track 1a and track 1b. Sandwiched between these two tracks are the transition tracks, where fades and wipes can be placed. Premiere's video overlay tracks (tracks 2 to 98) appear above the main video tracks. This is a more intuitive approach than that of Ulead's Media Studio in which the overlay tracks appear below the main A-B tracks.

However, Premiere does make the audio a little confusing because of the way they have labelled the audio tracks. A video placed into track 1a has its corresponding audio track placed into audio 1. A video segment placed into track 1b has its corresponding audio track placed into audio track 2. As a result, from this point on the number of the video track and its accompanying audio track do not correspond (eg. Video track 2 has its audio on audio track 3, and so on). Media Studio handles this better in my opinion, with video track Va having a corresponding audio track Aa, video track Vb having its corresponding audio track Ab, and then the resulting overlay tracks each having matching corresponding numbers (eg, Video track V5 corresponds with audio track A5, etc).

In addition to the main timeline window, Premiere also has a number of windows and palettes with which to work. At this point, it is worth mentioning that Premiere allows the user to customise the settings so that the work environment suits the working style of the individual.

The project window is where all of the needed files (video files, audio files, titles, stills, and other projects) are loaded and from here they can be dragged onto the timeline and positioned. The project window, like other windows in Premiere, can be customised to either show thumbnails of the files, or to show information in text form. I choose to use the latter as it provides the user with a great deal of information including details as to the type of file, file size, duration, and how many times that file appears in the project timeline.

Another available window is the transitions window that allows you to select which transitions are to be placed between the two main video tracks. A transition allows the scene to change from one track to another in myriad ways. The most commonly used of these is the cross dissolve where one scene -fades" into the next. However, Premiere provides over 70 transitions that can be used. In fact, many more transitions can be provided via -plugins" available either on the Web or from third-party providers.

When a transition is to occur between tracks A and B it is necessary to ensure that some overlap exists between these two video tracks (usually about 1 or 2 seconds). The transition will then -snap" to the correct duration when placed between these tracks. Double-clicking on them can further customise some transitions, but most of the standard Premier transitions only allow you to change start and end values and the direction in which the transition operates. Video and Audio Filters
Adobe Premiere comes with over 60 video filters and over 20 audio filters, which allow you to alter these tracks in any number of ways. By right-clicking on a video file you will be able to colour correct it, brighten it, emboss it, flip it, and so on. I have noticed a bug with the -reverse" filter, which should play a clip backwards. It did play the clip backwards but also split the screen in half horizontally and had the film mirrored in the bottom half of the frame. This certainly isn't what the filter claimed to do in the help file. On a positive note, every other filter I have applied has worked as reported.

Audio filters include a range of equalisation effects, as well as reverb, chorusing, delay and panning. The audio filters have been useful in allowing certain files to be mixed and edited to allow consistency of audio output throughout an entire project.

Previewing and the Monitor View
Another vital window provided by this application is the monitor window, in which a great deal of fine-tuning of the project takes place. The monitor windows allow either a single view of the file you are working on or it allows you a double-screen view that shows the work file on the left and the project output on the right. In addition, this window can be switched to -trim view" mode, which allows frame-accurate cuts to be made between two adjacent video segments.

In effect, the monitor window is the screen on which you can view your files and fine-tune your cuts and edit points. The monitor window contains the familiar transport controls (play, stop, rewind, still advance, etc.) that you tend to find on video equipment and computer media applications. Additional controls allow you to mark points in a file, set in and out points, and insert or extract video segments. Double-clicking on an audio file also allows you to fine tune audio edits in much the same way, although it does not display the waveform in this view.

The monitor window appears when you double-click on a file. Or that's how it should happen in theory. I have found many inconsistencies in the way the monitor window operates on our system. Double-clicking on a file or opening up the monitor window via the menu command doesn't always bring that window to the front. I have often had the transition window or at times even the timeline window obscuring the monitor view. I have heard the video playback and have seen the timeline marker move but the monitor remains hidden. This is a frustrating aspect, which requires unnecessary minimising of the other windows in order to view the monitor output. Of course, clicking on the timeline minimise button results in the playback being halted anyway. The opposite situation can also occur on occasions. When single-clicking on a file to select it, the monitor window sometimes pops up in front. This should not happen if you are merely selecting a segment in order to apply a filter.

The other thing I have noticed is that playback of a video file while Premiere is running results in very sluggish performance. Now this may in part be due to the requirements of full-screen, full-motion video and limitations in computer architecture. In fact, using Premiere, I have run into huge time lags in using the transport controls, and attempting to pause at an exact location is near impossible. (The system I use has 128MB of RAM and each new project uses newly formatted hard drives. I suspect that perhaps Adobe Premiere uses much of the system resources when it runs and that more memory and perhaps a graphics card upgrade may solve this issue. However, I have found that Media Studio seems to play back the same files much more smoothly and it is more responsive all round.)

Ulead Media Studio Pro

Media Studio version 5 struck me as being an excellent product and it was packed with several featuresâ€"many more than I have managed to use. This application can be thought of more as a -suite" of programs as opposed to a single application. As well as the video editing package, Media Studio comes bundled with an audio editing application, a paint program, and a dedicated titling package.

When first run, Media Studio is similar to Premiere in that the user is presented with a timeline view of the project. Once again, a certain amount of customisation is possible, allowing the individual to set up the interface to their liking. As mentioned earlier, however, the placement of overlay tracks below the main A&B edit tracks doesn't make for an intuitive understanding of their function. In addition, Premiere has a much better system of controlling transparency of the overlay tracks by providing a visual guide of opacity when the video tracks are expanded. Media Studio allows this to be achieved as well, but the process is a little more involved, requiring a window to be accessed and cue points to be placed at the relevant location. Then the transparency options can be customised at the appropriate cue points.

Like Premiere, Media Studio allows the user to have a large number of tracks (up to 99 overlay tracks in addition to the A&B tracks). However, for each video track added, an accompanying audio track is also added. Premiere offers a little more flexibility in this instance, since video and audio tracks can be added independently.

Adding clips to the Media Studio timeline is a simple matter of double-clicking on an available track and an import requestor appearsâ€"much simpler than having to load a file and then drag it onto the timeline from a project window. The other thing I liked about the way files behaved was that a video track and its corresponding audio track behave in unison so that if the video track was deleted, its audio track went with it. In Premiere, while the tracks moved together when positioned on the timeline, deleting one track does not remove its accompanying trackâ€"something it took me a little time to get used to. Media studio does allow you to break the link between an audio track and its accompanying video track so that you may delete one without affecting the other.

When precise edits have to be made, a monitor window can be open up by double-clicking on a video file. This allows in, out and cue points to be set. Generally, however, Media Studio does not implement this feature as well as Premiere does. Transitions and Filters
Like Premiere, Media Studio has no shortage of built-in transitions with over 90 available for the user. The thing that I preferred in Media Studio, however, was the great deal of control that can be exercised over the way transitions operate and the ease with which they can be previewed. The same can be said for the video filtersâ€"Media Studio provides the user with greater scope for fine tuning than does Premiere. It offered slightly fewer video filters (just over 50) and audio filters (around a dozen) than did Premiere.

On the topic of audio, there is another aspect that I preferred in Media Studio related to audio files. When you double-click on an audio file, a window opens up which displays an enlarged view of the audio waveform. In Premieree, this does not happen and you are forced to edit audio by sound alone, or by trying to decipher the small waveform presentation, which appears in the timeline window. With Media Studio however, the waveform can be enlarged to full screen, making it possible to -see" pops and clicks and making it easier to judge certain words and phrases by sight. This was an invaluable feature when setting in and out points on a narration and I miss it now that I am working in Premiere.

As stated earlier, Media Studio bundles a range of sister applications with its editing package. A standalone sound editor can be employed to make editing audio files a breeze. While the aforementioned audio filters can be employed to modify sounds in a variety of ways, the audio editor allows a range of precision effects to be applied. While the package is not of the quality of a fully-fledged audio manipulation tool (such as Sound Forge, for example) it does a very good job. Fades, pitch shifts, reverberation, and resampling can all be achieved quickly and easily and applied at specific cue points along the waveform.

Video Paint is a painting application that also comes with Media Studio. It not only allows you to create or edit a still image, it will import a video file and display the frames along the bottom of the screen. You can move from frame to frame and actually paint onto each frame of the video file to create animated effects (called -rotoscoping"). It has an -onionskin" option that allows previous frames to show through so that animations can also be created in a more -traditional" manner. A range of drawing tools and textures are available for use together with some video filters.

Both Adobe Premiere and Media Studio's video editor have built-in titling modules that allow you to include still or moving titles in any available font or colour and with the ability to have filters and moving paths applied to it. This is clearly adequate for most purposes. However, another application called CG Infinity is also provided with Media Studio. It is a title generator and the options it provides are quite extensive and very impressive and allows for the production of high quality video titling incorporating animated objects as well as text. These vector-based objects can be scaled, rotated and moved along pre-defined paths allowing for very complex titling effects.

All of these functions can be achieved with third-party products but the fact that these applications are included makes Media Studio a very powerful and feature-packed application. Perhaps the paint application falls short of a product like Photoshop (which has the best image manipulation functions I have seen) and the audio editing application doesn't measure up to Sound Forge. But they are free! Conclusion
Trying to decide which application is superior is a very difficult process. Adobe Premiere is certainly the more widely used and, as a result, there are a wide range of third-party plugins and utilities available for this product. It is currently the software application that I use because it works better with the QuickTime -MOV" file format that is the format supported by my capture card (Bravado DV2000). In Premiere, if the original MOV clip is unchanged, it quickly outputs (streams) the video data into the resultant file without the need to re-render it. Media Studio also supports MOVs but when generating the final video file, it processes (renders) any video segment, regardless of whether filters and/or transitions have been applied. This leads to significantly longer rendering times in Media Studioâ€"up to 10 times longer. (Note that Media Studio does not have this problem with AVI files, and the rendering of the final output is as fast as Premiere's.)

I have a few concerns with the way Premiere has been operating on my system. It is definitely more prone to system crashes than any other software I have installed on the system. Media Studio, on the other hand, has always been a fairly robust application and crashes are rare. I also find Premiere to be a little less responsive to user input (either via mouse or keyboard) than Media Studio. Using the transport controls on the monitor window becomes very frustrating since delays in response are often observed. Media Studio does not suffer this problem at all. There is also the aforementioned problem with Premiere's monitor window not always being placed in front of other windows when activated. In addition, I prefer Media Studio's ability to enlarge an audio waveform on a window to allow accurate audio cueing to be performed visually.

I find that titles I have generated with Media Studio are a little 'cleaner' than those generated with Premiere and the addition of CG Infinity and Video Paint applications allow greater scope for the production of graphical content.

Both applications do their job well and both are streets ahead of online video editing done in the -traditional" way. My personal preference is to lean towards Ulead's Media Studio because my thinking and way of working is more in tune with the way this application presents its options. However, until it is able to write out MOVs more efficiently, or until I obtain a new -AVI-friendly" DV card, I am happy to continue working with Premiere.

Albert Stefani is a computer support analyst, has taught VCE Information Technology and Media Studies, and is also employed by V&C Environmental Consultants as part of their training video development unit.

Editors' Choice,

So you have a nice new DV camcorder and have caught the video editing bug : the product for you is Swann's FireWire VideoWorks. This DV card is great value at just $299 and, better still, if you already have an editing package like Premiere you can purchase the Starter Kit which simply lacks the MainActor editing software for only $199.

If you have an analogue camcorder and a good graphics card in your PC, then in the low-cost category the Pinnacle DC10 Plus produces nice vivid colour and quite good definition. At $552 it is more expensive than some of the DV offerings but you must take into account all the hardware required to convert the analogue signal into something digital that your PC can work with.

If you are genuinely serious about your video editing then the Pinnacle DV500 (we've given it a Merit Award) will produce professional results from either DV or analogue sources, naturally at a professional price.

Finally, if you have a pretty naff graphics card and are looking to upgrade your graphics and dabble in video editing, then the pick of the three tested is the Matrox G400 Marvel (which also wins a Merit Award). The Matrox has a good graphics chip and arguably the best output quality of the three; we also found Avid Cinema to be less buggy than Ulead VideoStudio 4.

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