MPEG-2/Dazzle

cam13 wrote on 3/24/2002, 5:21 PM

I am considering purchasing Video Factory to supplement my Dazzle Video Creator II. I tape directly from TV, in MPEG-2. I want a program more robust than Movie Star for making videos. I have tried Ulead VideoStudio, but the MPEG-2 files load very slowly, and render even slower, so it's not really a good choice.

Is anyone using Video Factory to make small music videos using MPEG-2 video files, and if so, does the rendering process seem extremely slow? I get from the specs of this program that it does not recommend using MPEG-2 files to work with, only to save as.

Comments

parrim wrote on 3/24/2002, 10:29 PM

I have used Dazzle's Video Creator II with Video Factory. VF will import the MPEG file; however, because the way MPEG encodes with key frames it is difficult for the computer to show you a quality preview of your video. Slower computers will tend to skip frames in the preview screen and your timeline view may miss a few screen frames as you skip ahead to add a transition or place an exact edit mark. The final render to DV or whatever your final source is should be fine. Just be prepared for a less than perfect experience while trying to view your edits.

A simple solution ( but time consuming ) is to re-encode your imported MPEG into a DV AVI file before editting it. Video Factory does an excellent job editting files in AVI because the compression allows each individual frame to be accessed.