Comparing the Included Software
Ulead VideoStudio V4.0.
Ulead is simple and easy to operate and, as seems to be the case with many -simple" things in life, it ain't feature rich. As you can see from the screen capture there is a logical progression of menus across the topâ€"Start, Capture, Storyboard, Effects, Voice, Music, and Finish. These are pretty self-explanatory, but a few of the more obvious shortfalls are the program's inability to dissect a clip. 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.
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