View Full Version : Simple HD video capture & making a movie
I am after recommendations.
I've got a Sony HD camcorder and have been using Pinnacle Studio 10. It works but was incredibly buggy.
Then I lost the XP partition and bought v11 in the hope that it crashes less often.
It works but all output video (all formats) are covered in horizontal lines...
Pinnacle's moron support tells me to update the video drivers, which I have done and even reinstalled XP.
Then went back to v10 and it does the same thing too!
Unfortunately I cannot revert to the exact previous config because XP itself has been updated.
Pinnacle complains the video card has insufficient memory to use its acceleration features and says it is rendering with GPU acceleration OFF. It seems to do it just fine. The video card has 128MB - ATI Radeon 9800XT.
I am sending back v11 for a refund, but wonder what else is there I could try which is SIMPLE to use, for making very basic movies.
A year or so ago I tried Liquid 7 and found it complicated but most importantly totally failed to make it work - the output had sound but no video, despite a lot of unofficial support from the L7 user community.
anotherthing
6th Feb 2008, 10:21
Try looking for Ulead (the later) software or even premier pro elements 4.
spannersatcx
6th Feb 2008, 10:32
Pinnacle website says:
256 MB required for HD and AVCHD editing (ATI Radeon 9600+ or NVIDIA GeForce 6 or higher recommended)
which would suggest your video card is not really upto it I'm afraid.
anotherthing
6th Feb 2008, 10:51
And as Spannersatcx has said, it's possibly the video card.
I didn't really notice what you had said about your card size - I would recommend going for larger than 256Mb - at least 512Mb... HD editing is very heavy on the demands, minimum requirements are just that.. the very minimum needed.
A bigger card will alleviate problems and speed things up, making your editing much less frustrating!
Bushfiva
6th Feb 2008, 11:28
what else is there I could try which is SIMPLE to use, for making very basic movies.
Windows XP SP2 includes Movie Maker 2.1, which may work with your camera. Since it's free and just sitting there, it may be worth checking out.
256 MB required for HDNot for Pinnacle v10.x which used to work fine.
Maybe the change was in the very last 10.7 or 10.8 patches......
Nevertheless an interesting point. I might look for a Radeon 9800 with more RAM.... Ebay :)
spannersatcx
6th Feb 2008, 21:22
I haven't done any rendering recently but 3 things you do need are a good CPU a decent amount of RAM at least 1GB and a decent graphics card.
I have a 2.8 CPU, 2GB RAM and a 512mb ATI X1950 pro and that sometimes struggles and I'm not doing HD.
Windows XP SP2 includes Movie Maker 2.1, which may work with your camera. Since it's free and just sitting there, it may be worth checking out.
I can't believe I never spotted that one......... it actually seems to work. Many thanks!
I make a lot of films and also product advertisement on the side. I recommend, if you wanted to do anything really fancy, that you use Avid products.... the quality is without a doubt the best i've seen. However just for home use go with Adobe Premier Elements - very flexible program, easy to use for a basic user and some great tools with it!
I've downloaded Premiere Elements 4, only to find that it (and v3 too) require a processor with the SSE2 extensions.
The "state of the art" PC I built up 2-3 years ago doesn't have this processor and an upgrade would need a new motherboard. The current MB, a Gigabyte GA-7N400L, has a SATA/RAID controller and if I change the MB I will need to find one with the same SATA controller, otherwise Windoze won't boot anymore. I don't want to lose the windoze installation because it has a pile of software I need and would take days to reinstall.
I seem to have a few options:
1) Try to find out why Pinnacle stopped working. I think that they changed their video card requirements somewhere just after patch 10.5... I am going to buy another video card and see if that fixes it
2) Find a motherboard which can take the AMD 64 processor (with SSE2) and which has the same SATA HD controller
3) Find some other video editor program which doesn't need SSE2. All the Adobe stuff seems to need this.
4) The XP SP2 Moviemaker does not recognise my (very common) Sony HD camera, via 1394. There appears to be no config anywhere. Otherwise, it would probably do the job.
5) Build a whole new PC just for this occassional function.
A lot of people use Avid. I tried Liquid7 a year or so ago, and after a few days' messing the best I could do was a movie with sound but no video. It is possible that the AMD non-SSE2 processor was the problem since L7 lists Pentium 4 (which is an SSE2 processor) as the minimum requirement. No AMD processors are listed as usable. Clearly it did not check during installation and simply made a black video... stupid.
One thing I would like to be able to do, one day, is a movie taken from an aircraft which contains, say near the bottom, air data computer output parameters such as IAS, HDG, GS, TK, FOB, etc. These would be taken from a text file which contains the date/time on each line. If the line also contained lat/long data, one could generate a separate image sequence showing the aircraft position over a map, and then bring this sub-movie into a corner of the main one. Can L7 do this?
Don't live by manufacturers recommendations. Run what software you want to run on what system you have. I have AMD Opteron 146 at 2.7ghz, 1gb OCZ ram and my pc handles premier elements no problems and I usually have edits that are between 2 minutes - 1hr or so long.
I have AMD Opteron 146 at 2.7ghz, 1gb OCZ ram and my pc handles premier elements no problems and I usually have edits that are between 2 minutes - 1hr or so long.
According to this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2), AMD added SSE2 with the Opteron, which is what you have. I have an AMD Athol XP 3000, bought sometime in 2004.
Interesting though - means Adobe are being economical with the truth in specifying Intel only. I wonder what the deal is?
PPRuNe Dispatcher
10th Feb 2008, 08:40
I've been using Vegas Video http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/products/vegasfamily.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Vegas
for about 5 years.
It's easy to use - I taught someone who'd never used a video editing program how to use it in about an hour - and that included teaching her how to combine and select concurrent footage from multiple independant cameras & combine them into one video stream.
It's powerful.
It doesn't require a mega-machine to run. I run it on a 4-year old PC and it's quite fast enough.
The consumer-level version "Vegas Movie Studio" is cheap, around £30, and a trial version can be downloaded for free. The platinum edition which supports HDV is around £50, and again a trial can be downloaded for free.