Well, I have completed my big "Ren & Stimpy" project, converting
hours of old VHS tape into two DVD's, and thought I'd share the
final results.
I struggled with Pinnacle Studio 8 for a LONG time. It has one of
the best, most productive user interfaces out there, and there is
a lot of flexibility in creating and editing DVD menus. But it is
one of the BUGGIEST pieces of software I've ever used. It
crashes, gives odd results and the patches break more than they
fix, sometimes.
The last straw was the horrible quality of the final DVD video
produced. Nothing I could do would get the video in a stable,
non-jittery form. It was infuriating, because you had to put so
much time into it just to get it to work, then the result was so
low-quality. After you made one or two adjustments, you would
have to save, close down the program and restart the thing in
order to avoid constant crashes, for example, so the editing and
DVD Menu process took a LOT longer than it should. But because
Pinnacle Studio 8 is so flexible and easy to use in many areas,
it seems worth it.
Well, after the cruddy looking final video and jittery DVD menus,
I decided to re-install the Ulead Suite that came with my
Pioneer. Yeah, the interface is whack compared to the Pinnacle
screen. Like the fact that you can't have more than one line of
clips unless you maximize the whole video clip thing. Pinnacle
lets you choose a nice 3 row set of clips with a normal sized
video editing window next to a work space on the upper left side.
Ulead forces this huge behemoth looking thing on you with a HUGE
video edit/display window. Even when I set it to show the preview
window at real-size, it keeps that huge window there with black
area around the edges. The interface takes up the whole stupid
screen, and on a 1920x1440 display, it just looks lame.
BUT, the Ulead Video Studio software works without crashing. I
choose these 4 or 5 AVI files, each 2 gig in size of 704x480
MJPEG clips, and start editing. I cruise along the clip with the
jog bar, find the part where the clip ends, and "SPLIT" the clip.
I repeat this process over and over, deleting those split clips
(just markers pointing to the AVI, not the actual AVI segments)
that contain the commercials and such so that what is left is say
12 individual Ren & Stimpy clips ready to be made into a DVD. I
like the way Pinnacle Studio does the preview a bit better too,
as it has a "fast forward through the clip while watching it"
option, making it a bit easier to maintain track of where you are
than the JOG bar thing, but still, it all worked out.
Next step was to set the preferences to export to 704x480,
instead of 720x480, which is very easy to find in the Ulead Video
Studio program. Worked like a charm. It has 3 different options
for Frame Type (Frame Order A, Frame Order B and Frame-Based)
defaulting to Frame Order A (have no idea what that means), and
you can set the audio to MPEG too, which saves space and makes
sure the whole thing is fully integrated with the video. I just
did all that after clicking on the SHARE text on the top menu
bar.
First obvious option was to save the file to disk, which I did.
It saved it as 4+ gig MPEG file smack on the hard drive that
looked pretty darn good. It dithers the colors a little bit, kind
of like how when you scan a magazine page with the scanner and it
has that "grainy, patterned dither" look that you can usually get
rid of with a "Soften" or "Blur" effect. But in the end, it
looked so far superior to what the Pinnacle app put out, I was
not complaining. I had chosen NTSC DVD and cranked the quality up
to 100, partially due to the fact that the video source tape was
recorded in SLP 12 years ago...
Then I fire up Ulead DVD MovieFactory 2, Start a new DVD project,
add the video MPEG file, go to the ADD/EDIT CHAPTERS area and
begin the process of adding/editing the DVD Menus. You are much
more limited here than in Pinnacle Studio 8, but hey, it just
works, so I did not mind too much. It is geared for a Top menu
than Chapter Menu structure. I could not find an easy way to do
only a single level of menu. I suppose if I exported each and
every clip as its own MPEG file, I could have done a Top menu
that in essence was a Chapter menu, but I did not bother to test,
since rendering the MPEG takes hours.
The part to add chapters is NOT as precise as Pinnacle is. With
Pinnacle you can select the specific point in the video, down to
the 10th of a second, where you want the chapter to begin. Of
course, if the starting screen is a black fade-in, Pinnacle often
would screw up and turn the whole clip green during render, which
was a bug, so I guess that feature did not work all that well.
Still, the fact that you could NOT adjust the timing to the 10th
of a second got really annoying. You could only do it frame by
frame, but the problem is, there were only two stops that were
allowed - like at .06 and .28 or something. The scene fade to
black and back out would occur at say .15, but you had to either
choose .06 and get a tiny bit of the last scene at the chapter
point, or choose .28, and instead of coming from black to fade
in, you got a bit of the new scene on screen and had to start
there. It is annoying if you are a perfectionist.
But, once you get the chapters set, you can close that interface
(saving the project just to be safe) and then choose to progress
through the wizard. You get a default top-menu style, which you
can modify slightly by first picking a pre-canned setup from a
fairly nice selection (I liked the Corporate styles) and then
editing font color, size and value. I could not find a way to
change the placement of the text or the canned thumbnail windows
though. What I do like is that you can choose from pre-selected
layouts that go from 2 all the way up to 12 thumbnails on a menu,
which is very cool indeed.
For the main page I choose up to 2 clips with text on the right
side, and since I only had one movie, it just put one thumbnail
on the left side per the style. I edited the text no problem
(though there is a character amount limit it seems) and clicked o
n the thumbnail window. Up pops a small video window where you
can scroll through the video until you find the thumbnail you
want and then click OK to have that image show in the thumbnail.
Oddly, I COULD use the 10th's of a second scrolling in this
location. So, I could go .10, .11, .12, .13, of a second until I
found the precise frame I wanted. Why they don't allow this in
the Chapter setting area is beyond me. It is SO important. Plus,
I wish they had a "fast forward" type of deal like I mentioned
earlier that Pinnacle has so that I could easily browse through
the video, seeing the whole thing as it goes by, then hit pause
when I get close. When you use the JOG bar thing, it does not
show the video LIVE as you do it - only shows you the frame you
stopped on. In a strange, long clip like this, the live preview
fast forward is really useful.
So, for the Chapter menu I followed the same process. I wanted to
include a thumbnail for each of the 12 chapters (one chapter for
each scene). I knew it had a limit of 12 chapters per menu from
poking around before, so I kept that in mind when I fashioned the
video. The default had 3 thumbnails, and all I had to do was
choose CUSTOMIZE, scroll down the selections and choose the
format I wanted. They had 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 and 12 thumbnail
configurations, which was just totally awesome. I just picked 12,
and it redid the whole menu screen with 12 thumbnails, each
linked to the chapters I had already established. Since there
were 12 thumbnails, there was not room for each to have a text
caption, which was fine though. I clicked on the first one, moved
forward a few seconds, found the frame, and clicked OK. The next
part was cool. When I clicked on the 2nd thumbnail, the "jog bar"
thing started right at the beginning of the time index at the
start of chapter 2, meaning I did not have to start at the
beginning of the 1 hour and 8 minute movie and jog all the way to
chapter 2, 3, etc. Still, I wish it had that fast forward preview
thing.
At the end of this say 15 minute process, roughly a minute per
thumbnail or so, I had the chapters all setup with nice,
descriptive images in the thumbnails and was ready to move on to
the next part of the wizard. I chose a project of 704x480
(instead of the standard 720 default) and decided to save the
files to a VIDEO_TS folder that I could burn with NERO 5.5.10.42.
It's just easier that way for me, since my burner is on my
machine and I was doing the rendering on my 3rd machine so as not
to tie up my main machine.
Cool thing is that there is a check box where you can tell it to
FORCE all MPEG's to be processed, even if they conform to
standards, or you can tell it that if it finds an MPEG that is
compliant, it can just read it in as-is and make the DVD, saving
HOURS of re-processing. I chose both during testing, and both
worked just fine.
I burned the VIDEO_TS folder to a DVD+RW for testing, and found a
few small tweaks I wanted to make (like changing text to yellow
instead of cyan/white for better clarity/contrast on the TV) and
then re-processed the DVD project, saving a ton of time since I
had checked the option to simply read-in the compliant MPEG file.
When I got the final look and functionality I wanted, I burned
them to my trusty TDK brand DVD-R disks and I had 2 sets of Disk
1. Did the same thing for the second MPEG I had made from the
other hours of clips recorded from my Matrox G400-TV and AVI_IO
(which ensures video/audio sync) and I gave one set of the 2 DVD
Collection to someone at my wife's work and have the other set
for me.
Bottom line is that even though I did not have the precise
control with Ulead that I had with Pinnacle, and even though the
Pinnacle interface is superior in terms of usability and even
productivity (when it works), the Ulead software was able to help
me put my project together faster and with less hassle than the
Pinnacle Studio 8 program. Even though the chapter menus and such
are not as flexible, they work just fine. You can import your own
backgrounds, and though the text limitations may be problematic
for some, it should work for most. I liked that the Ulead setup
did have canned configs for up to 12 thumbnails per screen,
especially since copying, pasting, aligning and keeping chapter
assignments in order is so challenging in the buggy Pinnacle 8
software.
I now have Two Finished Ren & Stimpy DVD's based on video caps
from the old days and they look pretty darn good on the screen,
especially compared to the output Pinnacle produced. I could not
have done it in Pinnacle. I tried. I sought tech help, got all
the patches, etc., but the software is so buggy I just could not
do it. Ulead, with its lame interface and other quirks may not be
the prettiest or the most configurable, but it flat out gets the
job done.
Yes, long-winded, but I thought this might help others who are
trying to make Pinnacle work for them, especially in that it
should show up in searches.
So, if you are having trouble, check out Ulead Video Studio and
DVD Movie Maker. It may take some getting used to, but you may
also find you have more luck with it than Pinnacle.
Good luck, fellow video editors!
Well, I have indeed tried the very latest patches and the program
is still full of bugs. 8.10.4.0c is the one I am working with
now, but it has introduced a number of bugs in the DVD Menu
system, for one. Things that work perfectly well in 8.1.1 no
longer do in 8.10.4.0c.
For example, when editing a standard DVD menu to include 9
thumbnails instead of 6, not only does the program crash
frequently as I use the keyboard and mouse to align and position
thumbnails, it re-orders the chapters assigned to those
thumbnails, so that instead of having the boxes go in rows as
they are supposed to, like 1,2, 3 then 4, 5, 6 and 7, 8, 9, they
end up in seemingly random orders, such as 3, 2, 4 and 1, 5, 7
and 6, 8 9, or some such thing.
If I do the same editing in 8.1.1, the menus come out just fine
in terms of order, though the program still crashes so often
during those adjustments, I must save after nearly every
operation.
I have 3 machines and have the 8.1.1 installed on the third, and
8.10.4.0c on the first, and have tried swapping installs to
different machines, but to no avail.
Why not stick with 8.1.1 you ask? Why, it crashes on the final
render every time, while 8.10.4.0c does not.
This is just a small example of the types of issues I have had
with Pinnacle. It has been extremely frustrating.
