I took on the job of creating a DVD of this year's choir concert. I used my Canon Vixia HF20 HD (1080i) camera to record the video and sound and frankly, it did a great job. Now came the hard part.
I wanted to use the software that I had so I started with the application that came with the camera (ZoomBrowserEX) which did not recognize my own camera--even though Windows 7 did. I copied off the almost 2GB (of the 48 GB capacity) of MOV files. I tried to edit them in Windows Live Movie Maker--it just crashed. Microsoft was no help. Apparently the WL team is open for output only. There are a bevy of reports of this issue on the web with no response that worked.
Next, I tried Camtasia Studio 7.0--my favorite screen-capture editing program. Unfortunately, it also did not recognize the HD-format files. They never got back to me with encouragement re future support of HD.
Next, I downloaded the latest HD-capable trial of Nero Vision. Unfortunately, the trial did not support HD. The software was supposed to support HD, it's just disabled in the trial. I was hesitant to invest in another package that might not work.
Next, I got a recommendation to use Pinnacle 14. I had a copy of Pinnacle 12 that I had installed with my TV card so the upgrade only cost $70. The install went fine (forever, but it worked) and I started work on the HD files. Yes, it would accept the MOV files but everything worked at a snail's pace. I ended up creating .MP4 files to build the DVDs. My system is a Core 2 Duo Quad with 8GB of RAM and fast SATA drives--a pretty powerful system but its CPUs were pegged most of the time even when I wasn't working on the project. Every hour or so Pinnacle 14 would crash, but since it frequently saved the project I didn't seem to lose much work at each crash. Their online product support was hopeless. I chatted with them several times but each time I had to start over as there was no continuity between sessions. Most of them told me the same thing: "Delete the support files". Swell, this takes about an hour on my 2-hour video. I could get a simple DVD built but if I wanted menus it took hours to reconfigure, burn a DVD and test only to find that they did not work as they did in the preview mode. When I got the menus working the sound was lost--all I got was "clicks" as if the sound driver was designed for dolphins or other cetaceans. I invested 8 solid days working on these videos before giving up. I had several "chat" sessions with the script-readers but they could not fix anything of consequence. Their email responses were also pretty sad. Each time I interacted with the site it would send me an acknowledgement message that was mal-formed, missing graphics and the text was printed in a very light text. The good news is that they made it easy to get a refund--which you can do in the first 30 days--and that's what I did.
In frustration, I went ahead and downloaded the latest Nero Multimedia suite. Wow. In two and a half days I had completed DVD videos that actually work and sound great. Every part of the operation was faster with only one crash. I can't tell you how frustrating it is having to think about each click 'cause it might cost 5 minutes to perform even the simplest operation--not an issue with Nero Vision. There were as many features as I needed (and more that I did not explore) and the result was a working DVD that I can be proud of. I did waste an entire day of that trying to build a very-high-res video that took far too long (almost 28 hours) to build but didn't really look that much better. I was able to create case inserts despite having to custom-tune the paper products settings. And I did it all without reading more than a few web sites for hints. Note: click on "Next"--it opens up more context-relevant steps. I also used Nero Burning ROM to manufacture the disks using two burners at once.
One interesting point. In all cases, these packages don't offer 64-bit versions. This means that they must restrict themselves to the 32-bit address space. The system reported that no more than 4GB of the 8GB available was ever used. It seems to me a 64-bit version (that was able to leverage the RAM) would be faster and make better use of my time.
Clearly, Microsoft is not a player here and doesn't want to be.
hth
You know it makes me wonder; What kind've mega specs would REALLY be good enough for a PC to run Pinnacle 14 for HD editing? I mean it would take a 128-bit operating system, a couple hundred Tera-Bytes of RAM and a 50-core processor at a speed of 100 googlebits per second. Seriously, there isn't a computer out there that could possibly make Pinnacle operate quickly. And in my opinion selling this program for what they say it should do borders on criminally insane. I remember when I first bought Pinnacle 7 and it sucked big time. Then in time, computers got better and they came out with Studio 11. Then finally my system didn't crash all the time. I say it's just a matter of time- Maybe in a couple of years they'll have a better version of Pinnacle that will actually work with HD editing. In the meantime I guess I'm stuck with 720 X 480.
Hi Bill, please try Edius Neo Booster, about $200. The best video editor around at that end of the market. Edits AVCHD natively. I had the same troubles as you with all those mentioned packages.