If it helps you feel any more comfortable with VideoFactory, i've created a 4.5 hour video with dozens of clips. Sync was perfect all the way through.

Aggie,
As an ex-user of VideoWave 3,4,5; ULead 4,5; and Moviestar 3, 4, 4.22, 4.23; I can assure you that you will not be disappointed in Video Factory. It blows the others away in quality, performance, and capability. Everything works without crashing. Having said that, you may have a slight learning curve adjusting to the timeline mode vice the story board. Have no fear, there are video tutorials built into the help function that will have you capturing and editing in a very short time. What will really delight you is that you have total control over the sound so you can match the video to the music peaks at just the right time. Video Factory is a basic professional editing program for about $50. Awesome! Give it a whirl. You'll never look back.
Randy

Having only now got to grips with the Trimmer and Insert at Marker options, I can now use VF in a really intuitive way. Yes, it's not VW's Storyboard approach and yes there is a need to learn VF's particualr way of doing things, but I could never ever go back to VW. Oh yeah... VF is sometimes "coy" in showing you its virtues. You need to be patient and coax it into being. It's true! And yes, I am waxing lyrical about its charms. I can only restate the comments of those above - download the demo, have a play, tell us what you think.

G

Thanks so much guys. Chienworks....that does make me feel better :D. I appreciate all your imput...i think im gonna go with this one...im so glad theres an alternative...i was beginning to think that the only way to edit was to have another pc especially for it (definitely not an option :)

Thanks Again,
Aggie

Aggie

I think we're in the same boat, though since I live in Europe my holiday video is from the US. I've had VF for about 3 weeks now and I'd agree with everything that's been said about its high quality. Don't be put off by the learning curve - the tutorials are excellent, particularly as you can use your own footage, and you can have a lot of fun just playing before you get down to some serious editing.

I'm a convert from Studio, which also uses a storyboard, and having to use a timeline approach has been a bit of a culture shock. I'd have to say it was a positive change though as it's forced me to take a more critical look at what I'm doing, rather than just dropping clips on the board and adding a transition. Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) definitely applies to my video footage!

Cheers

Ian G.

I've produced 45 minutes videos using VF and the video/audio sync is always very good so long as you work with DV format. If you try working with MPEG files (1 or 2), you'll run into trouble even in VF.

By the way, do NOT use VF's MPEG-2 encoder. The quality it produces is marginal, it is very slow, and the end results are unreliable. I rendered a 40 minute video only to discover that the audio was missing in the last 15 minutes -- very frustrating. I've learned to always use the DVD authoring software (I use Sonic MyDVD which was bundled with the HP DVD100 drive) to transcode DV format into MPEG-2.

VF is definitely much better the VW. The big problem with VW is if you have a long clip that you want to extract pieces out of, it can be very difficult to work with the fixed-dimension timeline. With VF, you can zoom in and zoom out at will to extract clips very precisely, while all the while keeping the audio in perfect sync.

Yup, I had VW 5 also (came with my new PC) and had two major problems.
1) Audio/Video synch.
2) Could never print-to-tape reliably with my Dazzle Hollywood.

VF works wonderfully each time. I've created movies up to nearly 2 hours (NTFS) with
no problem.

-Mike

This is my first post to this forum.

I currently use Videowave 4 SE (software bundled with my firewire card). It's been OK for me (I'm new to video editing), but it does crash more than I'd like. Also the audio editing capabilities are poor. So I am shopping around for a better package.

I've been trying the VF2.0 demo. It looks impressive, though I'd rather they offer a fully functioning time limited trial so I can make sure it works for me end to end (e.g. with the demo I can't output to tape).

One thing I do like with Videowave is the automatic scene detection. I like having the software break the video into clips for me which I can use for rough editing (I then can further edit/trim the clips). It appears that VF does support this, but only with DV files based on the timestamp. For most things I do that might be OK, but my next set of projects will be based on some old analog footage I have (which I am converting to DV). With this footage, there won't be any DV timestamps to use for the scene detection - so I assume when I capture an hour of video I'll get just a single hour long scene (or "event", if that is the right term in VF).

Without the "analog" automatic scene detection, it seems I have to manually split this video up, which looks time consuming. How do VF users do this?

Back to the DV scene detection...I tend to have a lot of short scenes which I am editing. So for example I might be taking 3 hours worth of captured video, containing hundreds of scenes, and will make a single 60 minute production out of this (which in turn would still have 100+ scenes). It seems messy that I'll have hundreds of separate files; in Videowave there is just a single file, with the scene detection information recorded separately. Other than it being messy, is there any problems (e.g. in terms of performance) with having hundreds of separate files?

Mark B

Mbryant, there is no need to break the long capture file into separate pieces. You can capture it as one long file and then use Split to make multiple events. These events will still point to the same media file, but will function as independant events on the timeline. Of course, the problem is that you'll still have to scan through the file manually and locate the split points, but the split process itself is as simple as pressing the S key.

Ok, I'll add my 2-cents.

Snooze. I'm completely pleased with and have confidence in VideoFactory!
I too had dissapointing results with Videowave5 (audio synch problems and I could never output to tape well nor capture reliably).
With VideoFactory, I've have no problems whatsoever. There was, however, a considerable learning curve for me when I attempted to print to tape (outputing a rendeded video back out to VHS). But this was solved when I discovered that some of the captures that were made with Videowave5 had problems and VideoFactory had difficulty outputing them to tape. I simply had to re-capture these clips using VideoFactory.

-Mike

Kelly,

Thanks for the reply, I'll try and spend some time practicing with the split function.

I've just realized something else that VideoWave does which I like and would not want to lose - when I don't make any changes to a scene, it renders faster than realtime (rendering to DV, with "SmartDV"). If I add text, transitions, etc to a scene the rendering is of course slower.

It doesn't appear that VF does this (as I can't render in the demo version, I can't tell for sure). Am I correct?

Mark

Mark, you're correct - that's one of VF's weaknesses! On the plus side though, the preview's very slick, so you shouldn't need to do much rendering.

Cheers

Ian G.

I'll admit that I'm not totally clear on what is meant by "faster than real time", but I'll pitch in this info:

When VF does rendering to a .avi file (which you'll do a lot of for use in Print To Tape), the render will be very fast for segments where you've not done any editing to the original scene.

Let's say you have a project where you have some introductory titles that fade in and out, then you have 5 minutes of footage, and then more titles. VF will be very fast in rendering the middle (unedited) part.

Even better, it will do the same thing even if you've done "cuts only" editing to that middle part. "Cuts only" means you've split the original footage into segments, moved them around, deleted certain segments, etc. but you've not added any transitions, etc. My experience has been that it will even be fast if I've added an "extra" audio track in addition to the audio from the raw footage. In other words, VF will indeed render to .avi very quickly for any segments where you don't add graphics, use effects, do transitions, etc.

As for rendering to .mpeg or other formats, obviously VF has to do the work to translate .avi into the other format(s) and this will take some time, but this would be true of any editing tool.

I can't compare directly to VideoWave, but I've spent some time with Pinnacle's Studio and with ULead's lower-end products, and I can add these comments:

1) VideoFactory has been VERY reliable even running on what I would consider a quite underpowered laptop.
2) I've not found the lack of a storyboard to be a problem at all. I tend to think that the storyboard idea is overrated since it takes about 10 seconds before you want to dive into the details and do detailed splits, etc. The whole idea of editing is to produce something that is watchable, not just rearrange a bunch of unwatchable material! If you find yourself missing the storyboard, just change the scale of the timeline and pretend you're in storyboard mode!
3) The control you have over audio in VF blows away anything I've seen in the other tools. It is great to be able to fade sound in/out, and tone down or edit out any short, annoying parts of an audio track. To learn more, search around for info on "audio envelopes."

Just 3 quick highlights... I could certainly go on!

gogiants,

By "faster than realtime" I meant that if I don't make many changes to the source files (such as adding text and transitions) it will render faster than the capture time. This is when rednering DV as DV (.avi). So for example I could render 60 minutes of video in 30 mins with Videowave (obviously depends on speed of PC and disk). If I do lots of text, transitions, etc it takes much longer.
This is exactly like what you describe in VF, where "will be very fast in rendering the middle (unedited) part".

And if the preview is good, that helps a lot. in Videowave I render a lot just to check that it looks OK.

I've done about as much as I can with the demo, and between being impressed with that and what I've read, I've taken the plunge and purchased VF. I'll soon be working on my first project with it, and hope I will not be dissapointed!

Mark B

Mark

Let us know how you get on.