>You can configure the MPEG rendering, adjusting frame rate, etc.

You can configure MPEG-1 rendering, but not MPEG-2. Most people don't have a problem with that.

Ian G.

About the trial: it's good for 30 days and it's fully functioning (you can save and render). You don't get plug-ins that are licensed (mpeg and mp3). But everything else is there.

Suzan

Oops, sorry for the inaccurate MPEG-2 info, and thanks for the correction, Ian. I just noticed that there are several templates for MPEG-2 rendering (as well as MPEG-1 rendering), so there is some flexibility.

I've never had a need (so far) to custom tweak MPEG rendering while doing home movies. I've been very pleased with the VCD and SVCD quality (especially SVCD) from MS3 and Ulead DVD Movie Factory 2. If you ever have a need for sophisticated tweaking, you could get a third-party utility such as TMPGEnc, which is relatively inexpensive but powerful (from what I hear).

MitchK

Mitch,

Do you do your rendering in MS3 or in Moviefactory2??

In MS3, dont you need the PRO plugin to get SVCD?? or is there a "base" setting for SVCD and DVD??

Honestly, I have been looking at VideoStudio by Ulead as well...Same Mainconcept encoder....

thx for the info

Mark

Mark,

Sorry I didn't reply sooner - I just checked in and saw your question.

Before I got MS3, I used to render from VF2 to avi format, which I then "imported" into Ulead DVD Movie Factory for the purpose of creating SVCD's.

But that's a bit cumbersome, and I no longer do it. The reason being I've upgraded from VF2 to MS3. MS3 includes MPEG-2 rendering out of the box, whereas with VF2, that option cost extra.

So now I render in MS3 to MPEG-2, being sure to use the NTSC SVCD template. That template is recognized as compliant in Ulead - just be sure to check the "do not re-render compliant files" option in Ulead, otherwise the disc burning will take much longer due to likely re-rendering.

Incidentally, both MS3 and the Ulead DVD MF2 both create very nice quality (to my eye) MPEG-2 files when viewed as SVCD's on a TV. The VCD's are decent too, but SVCD is obviously crisper.

If you have any other questions, feel free to drop me a line at mitch at kirsol dot com.

MitchK

> "If you already have Windows XP, an alternative to consider is Windows Movie Maker 2. It's a storyboard based editor, ant not as powerful as MS3, but it's a free download with Windows XP (and not available for other versions of Windows).

MitchK"

In what way(s) is Movie Maker 2 less powerful than MS3? I have a friend using MM2, and I've been curious about the differences. Can anyone shed any light on it?

Actually, Movie Maker is a very nice editor that handles most basic functions, pretty much on par with Mac's iMovie.

But MS3, on the other hand, is a scaled-down version of Vegas, a pro-sumer quality editor on par with Premiere and Final Cut.

With MS3, you have three tracks of video (something I've not seen in any under-$100 software), chromakey effects, pan-and-crop, excellent color and brightness correction, the ability to control sound levels on individual sound points on any of its three audio tracks (Movie Maker applies adjustments to entire clips) and, because every transition and effect can be tweaked and adjusted, an astounding number of effects are possible!

And that's in addition to lots of well-designed ergonomic features, like the ability to enlarge the preview screen with a single click and a trimmer that lets you choose only a portion of a clip to be added to the timeline.

So, I guess it depends on how serious you are as a video maker. No. Let me correct that. I guess it depends on how much fun you want to have editing your video.

Movie Maker is excellent, and you can't beat the price. But MS3 takes it to a whole different level!

I played around with Movie Maker 2 for about an hour or so several weeks ago. Doing a direct comparison of MM2 and MS3 isn't really fair, as MS3 is in a different league, but here are my recollections of where MM2 falls short with respect to MS3:

Its clip-trimming capabilities are cruder. You can only cut from beginning to a certain point, or something like that. From a basic editing standpoint, that is its biggest weakness, in my opinion, but I'm already spoiled by MS3's elegant tools. Both will enable you to achieve the same end trimming result, but MS3 is way more convenient.

It doesn't have pan/crop, which is a very powerful tool for e.g. "animating" still photos as seen in professional documentaries (zoom into a face, for example).

It doesn't have chroma-key (think of "green screen") capabilities.

It only has a single video track, so you can't do things like picture-in-picture or overlaying a gif file or whatever.

It doesn't have adjustable opacity curves, which enable to selective fade in/out audio or video.

It doesn't have MPEG-2 rendering (if memory serves, it doesn't have any MPEG rendering at all). It also doesn't have numerous other output formats, such as Quicktime, Flash, Ogg-Vorbis, etc.

I can't recall if it enables you to do basic brightness/contrast/color adjustments, but I don't remember seeing them (MS3 has those things).

This is only a partial list. I'm sure I'm forgetting several things.

On the flip side, MM2 does have a couple of things that MS3 doesn't:

It has some nice canned text animations. (MS3 lets you animate text, but you must do it manually, which gives you more flexibility but also makes you work harder.)

It has bins for organizing your media.

Again, I'm not knocking MM2. It's a very good for what it is (a free add-on that comes with XP). For somebody who wants to do very basic editing (trimming out junk footage, adding music and titles/transitions), it's an intuitive, capable tool. But if you think you might want to go beyond that, and don't mind investing some additional learning time, I'd recommend going with MS3.

MitchK

Thanks for your responses. That was very helpful.

One other difference I've read about is in creating slide shows. It sounds like MM2 makes it easier to adjust the properties of the whole show. MS3 lets you do anything you want, but to adjust the duration of each slide, each clip would have to be adjusted individually. I definitely want to be able to do slide shows even if I won't be using MyDVD. I think MS3 is more than adequate in this area. It's the same old tradeoff of ease of use vs. how powerful it is.

Thanks again.

Well, I guess that depends on what you consider a good slide show.

If by "slide show" you just mean one picture fading into another, then Movie Maker or any other editor will do. In fact, there's some shareware that probably does it better.

But see how much more interesting your slide shows are if you move in, out and around each photo (not too much -- you don't want to make your audience dizzy!) a la Ken Burns. A little more work, true, but it makes your still photos almost come to life and gives your click, click, click slide show a whole other dimension!

So I still think we're comparing apples to oranges here.

Movie Maker is great for what it is -- but MS3 is much more powerful way to use video.

Good point about "zooming" and panning on stills in a slid show. I'd forgotten about that.

I'm definitely sold on MS3. I just wanted to make sure I'd examined all options before paying the $. I've been impressed with the demo version.