Home videos so-so?
With this software, you're a Spielberg
By David Armstrong, Globe Staff, 05/06/99
The images are familiar to millions of video camera owners around the world:
The wedding shots that linger far too long.
The blurry video of children playing.
The footage from that time you thought the camera was off, but it was actually recording and videotaping your feet.
Wouldn't it be great if there was an easy way to edit your very
obviously amateur video efforts?
Ever since I bought my first video camera earlier this decade, I have struggled with one crude editing solution after another. The best solution to date: Dumping my 8mm camera tape onto a VHS cassette and fast forwarding through the less appealing scenes.
In the quest for better editing, I recently experimented with four products that promise high-quality, easy-to-use video editing on your home PC.
The results of my efforts after far too many hours of plugging, loading, playing, and editing are mixed. Video editing on your desktop computer is possible, and in some cases, worthwhile.
On the other hand, be prepared to spend several, sometimes frustrating, hours installing a video capture card, learning the editing software, and trying to figure out how to hook up your video camera to the various devices that link it to the PC.
Be advised that video editing software promises to test the full ability of your PC. These programs, and the video clip files they create, are space hogs. To edit a video that will run 30 minutes, you can plan on using a couple of gigabytes of storage space.
In addition, you need a computer with optimal processing speed and as much memory as possible. If you have an older model PC, forget about video editing.
When the evolution of PC video editing is traced, these will certainly be considered the primitive years. However, a quantum leap in technology is just around the corner; by the end of the year, several products are expected to exploit a new video standard that will dramatically improve the editing experience.
The four products I used all sell for about $100. But software is not the only expense you will incur if you want to edit videos on your PC. You're going to need a video capture card to link your PC to your video camera or VCR.
Connecting your PC to an external device became much simpler with the advent of the Universal Serial Bus, known as USB, installed in most PCs built after 1997.
Dazzle Multimedia's Photo Maker
comes with a small, colorful external video adapter that connects through your computer's USB port. You simply plug it in to the back of the machine and it is ready for use.
For those who get queasy at the thought of taking apart a computer and inserting an internal video card, this external drive is the perfect solution. The Dazzle installation guide and user manual are clearly written and simple to follow.
Dazzle comes with the necessary cables to connect your video camera directly to the video adapter. After completing a simple software installation, you can begin using the editing interface. The video creator allows you to split, cut, trim and rearrange your videotape.
This isn't the slickest video editing package available, but it does a nice job of performing the type of bare-bones editing many home users desire.
There are several software packages that offer slicker editing, complete with tools to add music, titles, narration, and fancy transitions between scenes.
I tried three of the best-sellers:
Ulead's Video Studio 3.0, Avid Cinema 1.0, and MGI's VideoWave 1.5.
The products are similar in terms of the kind of editing that is possible and the extra features you can add to your home video. The differences are apparent in the ease in which you can edit your video and the time and effort involved. The clear winner in this regard was Avid Cinema.
Capturing video from your camera is easy, and within minutes I was busily trimming video, adding background music, creating titles, and introducing voice narration.
The Avid Cinema editing interface was the most intuitive of the products I sampled. A series of tabs at the top of the viewer window takes you through the four steps of editing your video and creating a new home movie. In the editing tab, a series of new tabs appear to add sound, create special effects and add titles. At the bottom of the viewer, a complete outline of all your editing efforts appears and various video and audio sequences can be moved about to suit your needs.
When you are done editing your video, Avid Cinema allows you to preview your finished product on the full computer screen or save it directly to videotape.
One of the drawbacks to Avid Cinema is that it will work only with five kinds of video capture cards. It will not work, for instance, with the Dazzle video capture device that connects to the USB port.
I used the ATI All-In-Wonder Pro video card, which has to be installed in an expansion slot inside your computer. Installing the card took only 10 minutes. However, I encountered a problem trying to get the audio to work with the card. After an hour of troubleshooting and checking all of the possible audio settings on my computer, I logged onto the ATI homepage. In a troubleshooting section, under audio, I learned there was a ''patch cable'' I had to connect between the card and my line input plug to get the audio to work. It was disappointing that this information was nowhere to be found in the manual that comes with the card.
While the audio problem was frustrating, the added bonus of buying the All-In-Wonder card is the ability to watch TV on your PC. After plugging the TV cable into the video capture card, you can take advantage of a slick TV tuner that adjusts to whatever size you want.
I purchased the All-In-Wonder card for $169, but it came bundled with several software products, including MGI's VideoWave. VideoWave does many of the same things as Avid Cinema and has a useful video tutorial. I didn't find the editing interace to be as friendly or intuitive as Avid Cinema's.
The final product tested was Ulead's VideoStudio, billed as the fastest way to great home videos. My biggest problem with this product was the so-called ''rendering'' process, in which video files are compressed and uncompressed.
I found rendering often took hours, even for clips only minutes long. In fact, the user's manual suggests rendering really big projects ''overnight or while you are at work.''
And here I thought the days of having to let a program run overnight had gone the way of dual 5-inch floppy disk drives.
Ulead product manager Brent McKendry suspected the problem with my excessive rendering time was the format of the files I captured, and suggested several helpful tips for reducing rendering time. One was to create a template reflecting the exact capture rate of the video file I was using. This helped, but not to the extent that I could ever recommend using the product.
On an optimistic note, McKendry said problems with rendering time are certain to become obsolete with the advent of a new standard for capturing video files.
The standard adopted by most of the computer industry is MPEG-1, which stands for Motion Pictures Expert Group. As your video is captured, it is compressed and decompressed using a mathematical algorithm.
This year, however, several programs are expected to start using a new compression scheme known as MPEG-2, which McKendry said will offer DVD-quality videos and dramatically reduce the demands placed on a PC.
''The future is fantastic,'' he said. At least it will have better home videos.
Staff reporter David Armstrong does computer-assisted reporting for the Globe.
