Hi Los Santos,

(1) To break up the big Studio files into scenes, get a free copy of Scenalizer at: http://scenalyzer.de/scenalyzer.zip . It does an excellent job of splitting by scenes after you already have an AVI file. (and the price is right)

(2) Ditto to what soundguy63 said. I haven’t had any problems with titles or insert text. Don’t forget to turn on boarders and shadows, which soften things a bit. I have seen some issues with scrolling text. I stick to fonts that are broad and bold and try to keep the scrolling slow enough that you don’t see the “creeping pixels effect”. I’ve even seen this problem with professional DVD’s too, so it’s not unique to VF.

(3) I would think that the upgrade to the basic MPEG2 encoder should give you the quality you need. I’ve also used TMPEGenc and I feel the MainConcept MPEG encoder is just as good. If you are thinking of upgrading to the advanced encoder for $99, I would go all the way and upgrade to Vegas for $199 and get the advanced MPEG encoder plus unlimited video tracks, chroma key, velocity envelopes, etc. That’s what I did and I’m very happy with Vegas.

The MPEG encoder that Ulead uses is Ligos LSX, which (IMHO) is not as good as the MainConcept MPEG encoder. I’ve been making VCD’s and SVCD’s for 2 years now and I’ve tried every MPEG encoder I could get my hands on and TMPEGenc and MainConcept are two of the best. (Your mileage may vary)

Hope this helps,

~jr

(1) Got Scenalyser and it works very well. Thanks for the tip. I want to look at their For Sale product, though I don't know exactly what it does yet.

(2) Yeah, my titles since that first go round have been fine. Maybe it was that I went back to AVI, maybe something was set wrong, but this turns out a non-problem.

(3) The MPEG2 issue still bothers me. I have the trial version of TMPEGenc but when I made a mpg it converted my file to two files--probably i had something set wrong.

(4) Are you sure the upgrade from VF2 to VV is $199? Elsewhere on this board someone said the upgrade was $270 (or maybe that was from another product?)

(5) No doubt now that VF is a much superior product to Pinnacle Studio 8. I can't imagine why PC Mag and others gave the Ed's Choice to S8.

(6) Interesting that you say that ULead uses Ligos LSX. I believe Sonic used to use the same, and switched last year to the Main Concept.

(7) Finally, as this version of VF came out a year ago (Jan 2002), can we expect and friendly priced upgrade from Sonic FOundry any time soon?

Thanks for your help. I dl'd the manual and went through that, have tried many of the features by now. THe pan & scan is very well done, even in VF, seems to me. Audio is (naturally) better than in any other product. Wish there were a storyboard view for those moments I need help remembering just what I'm doing. Like the FX button for P&S and the autofade and the media rack (or whatever it's called) especially with the Explorer tab and the autopreview arrow.

Altogether so far nothing but kudos for Sonic Foundry. And I don't think VF has frozen up on me once! Amazing. Studio 8 did that with alarming regularity. I'm trying to get my money back from Pinnacle. Wish me luck.

el tigre

(8) Oh yeah, wanted to ask if you can capture direct to MPG2 in VF once you have the decoder ring? Is this advisable at all? Right now I only have the 80 G drive and it fills up FAST!

I use the standard vf mpg2 encoder. I have tmpgenc too, but the vf way used a lot less disk space. I put the files on dvd and Im happy with the results.

The tmpgenc setting you need to output as 1 mpg file is to the right of the input/output files selector. Use 'System (video/audio)' (bottom option).

>(4) Are you sure the upgrade from VF2 to VV is $199? Elsewhere on this board
>someone said the upgrade was $270 (or maybe that was from another product?)

I was that someone. $199 for the upgrade is correct - if you buy VF and then upgrade to VV the total cost is $270. Sorry for any confusion!

Ian G.

well that makes it simpler. the mpg2 renderer in VV is the same one you buy for an extra 99, yes? so in a certain sense you're upgrading to VV for 100? sounds like a bargain.

Q. Can VV capture w/o dividing up into individual scene files and still eventually convert to scene files? Or would one simply use Scenalyser on the bulk capture? Are there advantages/disadvantages? I assume the multiple files take up significantly more space than the single file, yes?

thanks and cheers--

los gatos

do you know if there are any independent comparison reviews of the VF renderer and the tmpgenc version?

thanks--

Don't mean to over populate this thread, but just learned that Pinnacle WILL (!) refund my money (with a 15% RESTOCK FEE), but that means I'll have to buy another firewire card, and now I'm wondering how much that might cost, what card it should be, where to get it (PC Connection or Outpost.com?), etc.

Does the VV product come with a firewire card I wonder?

Anyway, I can look much of this up, but I would appreciate any advice.

los santos

Los Santos,

(1) The For Sale product is Scenalizer Live. It captures and creates AVI files on the fly from scenes just like VF does. You don’t need it. It’s for people who don’t use feature rich products like VF and VV. ;-) The free product is all you need for AVI’s that are already captured from other programs with multiple scenes in them.

(2) Glad to see this is working

(3) You were probably converting it to streams (video and audio) which some DVD authoring programs require. Check the settings and make sure the Stream Type is “System (Video+Audio)”

(4) Yep, the upgrade from VF2 to VV3 is $199? That’s what I paid right from the SoFo web site.

(5) Pinnacle is a well-respected company in the broadcast industry. The fact that they make a low end product that has stability problems does not detract from the fact that they do make other fine products. I’ve found that reviews from PC Mag and others giving their Ed's Choice to S8 are done by people who have no idea what the product is supposed to do. Next week they’ll be reviewing a video game. They just repeat what they read on the box. They don’t use the product in a real scenario. They capture 10 minutes of video, make a 10-minute DVD and say this product is great. Yea… until you try to make a DVD that’s greater than 30 minutes, then the product turns into a doorstop. Any review that doesn’t use a consistent rigorous benchmark that ALL software is measured by is not worth reading. IMHO, that’s called an editorial comment, not a product review.

(6) Yea, the Main Concept MPEG encoder is hard to beat for the price.

(7) Can’t speak for SoFo on this one. ;)

SoFo makes some killer products. It’s hard to go back to applications that lock up all the time after using a SoFo product. They need to advertise more. The industry should stand up and take notice. I think if they can get Premiere plugin’s to work they will really take off. Hopefully, this will happen over time. In the mean time we have to look out for each other. You’re the second person I’ve converted from Studio 8 to VF or VV. Now it’s your job to tag someone else. ;-) I can feel the ground swell happening.

(8) No, you can’t capture direct to MPG2 in VF and you don’t want to if you’re going to edit. Capturing to MPG is good if you just want to burn the source straight onto DVD. It saves time and disk space. If you want to edit, however, you want to edit in DV because it’s virtually lossless. MPEG will degrade with each recompression and it has editing problems because each frame is not a full picture (I frame) there are B and P frames that are differences between each full I frame. Not really ideal for editing. MPEG is really best just for final output.

If you’re worrying about your 80 GIG drive filling up, send your master projects back out to DV tape. Then you’ll have a source version and master version. Then delete the project from your hard drive once you burn a DVD knowing that you can always recapture it from the DV master with all the edits intact.

~jr

Johnny,

Does VV Print TO Tape directly from the timeline? Does it make an interim avi to do this? How long would a typical [what's typical?] - say several trannies, cuts and some text thrown in - 10 minute clip take to PTT?

Grazie

So far as I know, there's no firewire card with VF. A new one should set you back about $30, but make sure you get the right cable - it would normaly be 4 pin at one end, 6 pin at the other.

Ian G.

Grazie,

YES, this is one of my favorite features. VV prints to tape right from the timeline. It has an option to pre-render those parts that need rendering like transitions and FX. You can do this at any time so you get smooth playback of even extremely complicated multi-track FX. (although, it does a pretty good job of rendering these in real-time on my machine up to about 3 or 4 tracks). If you didn’t use pre-rendering, it will do that for you before you print-to-tape. No large AVI file or anything; just the smaller pre-render files. It’s a real time saver.

So to answer your question about time: If you use pre-rendering, the time to print-to-tape is the time of the piece your printing (10 minutes in your example). If you don’t use pre-rendering the time it takes to print-to-tape the time of the piece your printing plus the time for rendering just the trannies, cuts and text. It’s a very productive tool to work with and well worth the upgrade.

~jr

Johnny - Thanks . . .

Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Can't wait!

I've got a 1ghz PIII with 250mb ram. Are we still on track for the type of performance you say? Or putting it another way - whats your spec?

Grazie