Category Archives: Editing

Editing

MAGIX Movie Edit Pro – video editing software

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MAGIX Movie Edit Pro – video editing software.

I sprung for the “Plus” version of Magix Movie Edit Pro 17 Plus, from German software company, Magix. Runs on Windows.

I’ve only used it for a bit to do some “toy editing” of a mixed group of AVCHD files of different sizes and from different sources. Trying to make things hard for the program! Everything worked fine and was able to edit the AVCHD files natively on my $400 quad core Windows 7 box. I output to both 1280×720 and 1920×1080 MP4 files to watch on the computer and on a computer connected to the HDTV – excellent results.

The program has a unique user interface in that it can be operated in “movie clip” mode, like iMovie, or timeline mode, like Final Cut Pro, Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere. I found this interface very slick – I could string together whole clips quickly in “clip” view then switch to the time line and do more precise edits, create cross dissolves, etc. Creating dissolves is very easy and, by default, is set to automatic: just drag the edge of one clip over the edge of another and Movie Edit Pro automatically sets up a dissovle.

I’ve used only a few features such as image stabilization (worked VERY well for my test clips – better than the similar feature in Vegas).

I have not yet done a lot with this program – there are tons of filters, effects, and titling options, including “3D titles”. Oh, and there is even 3D video editing too. If you have two video streams, say from identical side by side cameras, you can stitch them together to make a red/blue (glasses) 3D video to play on your computer or your TV. Can’t wait ’til have time to try that out.

Overall, so far, I am very pleased. The regular price is $99 for the “Pro” version. The program delivers capabilities costing far more than that from other vendors.

Magix merged with Xara, the UK company that makes several programs for graphic design, photo editing, web layout and more. I own the Xara Xtreme designer and like it quite a bit. It is inexpensive and does most everything the “really expensive” packages do.

Cameras, Editing, Techniques

Recording video direct to Mac hard disk (updated)

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I have re-written this original post. I discovered that upgrading to Snow Leopard destroyed my ability to record from a Firewire HDV camera direct to the Macbook.  Apple has buried in a support note on their web site that this, apparently, previously relied on Final Cut Pro native HDV support. As of Snow Leopard, support for Final Cut Pro 5.1 was terminated and all users, especially those using HDV, must upgrade to FCP 6 or the newest version 7.

However, it appears there is still a work around to make this work, without any version of Final Cut needed for basic HDV capture live from the camera. And it even works with the new Quicktime X installed by Snow Leopard. (FYI – the older version of Quicktime Pro, if you had it, is moved to the Applications / Utilities folder so you can still use that too).

What you need to do

Go to Perian.org and download and install Perian on your system.

Go to this university web site and download the Perian HDV and MPEG2 components. These are ZIP files. Double click to unzip the PerianHDV.component file and the PerianMPEG2.component file.

Using Finder, navigate to the Library / Quicktime folder. Move the above two component files into the Quicktime folder.

Launch Quicktime X.

Choose File / New Movie Recording

When it starts, it shows the view from the built in iSight camera (if on a Macbook notebook). On the bottom of the screen are the video record controls. At the right hand side there is an inverted triangle. Click on that. This shows a pop up menu with a selection for Camera, Microphone and Quality. Select your camera, then select your camera also for the Microphone, and then set Quality to High. In “High”, Quicktime will capture your video in the HDV native format. Captured video will be saved to the folder listed in the “Save to” pop up menu item; you can change that if you want.

Then select the Red record button to record your video.

After capturing the video clips, I imported them into Final Cut Pro 5.1, which I have on my notebook. FCP gave a warning about these clips not being optimized for FCP, what ever that means, but I was able to drag them into the project timeline and edit without any problems. I assume this would likely work in FCP 3.5 HD also, if you don’t have version 4.

Sure wish I could have figured this out before last Saturday. Then, I did do some recording direct to disk using a work around of importing through iMovie. But this was gawd awful. I fed the live Firewire video into iMovie and captured the video. If you turn off the camera before stopping the iMovie capture, iMovie crashes. If you do it right, iMovie than starts creating “thumbnail” images. Which took 4 to 7 minutes for each clip! I didn’t have that much time before I had to start recording the next event!

I had to use Force Quit to kill iMovie, then restart iMovie and set up the capture all over again.

iMovie does not capture in native format either – it transcodes to AIC format and your 13 GB/hour HDV video grows to about 40 or more GB/hour, quickly using up your hard disk space.

While this work around using Perian will let you capture native HDV on your Mac notebook, you will still need either Final Cut to edit the native HDV file, or you can import to iMovie – which will then transcode in to AIC and make the file bigger.

Apple’s success seems to be causing them to turn into Microsoft in terms of their deleting functionality during upgrades and not adequately testing software, like iMovie.

Editing, Techniques

Editing Canon 24PF using Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10

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For a software project, I had to recently update my old Windows XP machine to a newer machine running Windows 7.

I decided to also look at the free demo version of Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10 editing software.

Update: The following review is not quite correct. My original test footage was inadequate to test this out. Here’s the scoop: Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10 will work with true 24P video. You can set a timeline to 23.976 and import video clips that are true 23.976. However, video recorded in the 2:3 24p “pulldown” mode which involves mapping 24p images into a 60i interleaved stream, will not work unless you use a separate program like Voltaic HD or CineForm’s NeoScene to remove the pulldown prior to editing.

I still really like Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10 – in fact I have ordered a copy – but it does not do  pulldown removal. But once I had everything in some form of 24p – including a combination of HDV, SD and AVCHD transcoded to remove the pulldown – I was able to edit the entire mix just fine in Vegas.

For a test, I gave it what I thought would be a difficult challenge – I combined 24PF video from an Canon HG10 in AVCHD format, with 24PF from a Canon HV30 in HDV format, with a 24P DV video stream. For those not familiar with those terms, 24PF is a 24 frames per second video stream embedded into a conventional 60i (interleaved) set of frames. To edit a 24PF video requires removing extra frames used to fit the 24 full frames into a 60 half frame (60i) video stream used by conventional video recording.

Incredibly – it worked!

I set the Project Properties to 23.97 IVTC (inverse telecine) option. I then imported the media – in the case of the AVCHD video clips, these were already on the system hard disk. The HDV was imported from tape using the Sony Vegas video capture function. The 24P DV video was actually shot as 60i on a Panasonic DV camera, imported and converted to 24p using DVFilm Maker.

And it just worked! I didn’t have to do any futzing around – it just worked.

I output the result to an MP4 file at 1440×1080 and the results are excellent.

Since the DV video was shot outdoors at an evening concert, the colors were muted. I used some Vegas filters to slightly increase the contrast and saturation, and added a bit of sharpening. This was then scaled up to the AVCHD/HDV frame size, producing an excellent result.

I’m still using the demo/trial version but I think Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 is a keeper. I’m pleased so far.

You can learn more and download the demo version at Sony Creative Software.

Editing, Techniques

More on converting AVCHD for editing

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This afternoon I downloaded and tried out the Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9.0b trial version. Vegas is unique in that it is able to edit AVCHD directly, without conversion.

But as I learned, you’ll probably need a dual core processor.

The process was slow on my 3.2 ghz single CPU PC with 1.5 GB of RAM and running Windows XP.  Vegas quickly imported the clips from the camera, and arranging them on the time line was quick and easy. BUT – all videos stuttered when I tried to play them without using the “render to preview” step.

By the time I started doing rendering so I could watch in real time, the whole process had bogged down. Converting to other formats was not real fast on the 3.2 Ghz machine, either.

Seems to me that if your system really can not handle true AVCHD editing, then you are best off doing a conversion to another editable format.

On the Mac, I’m likely to stick with Voltaic HD 2.x for both transcoding and elimating the 24p pulldown frames. Voltaic HD is also available for Windows. I have not tried the Windows version yet, but the idea is the same – it should transcode from AVCHD in to (probably) an .AVI file that you can use in your favorite HD capable video editor. (Note – not all video editors can handle 24p – you’ve been warned.

Now that Voltaic HD 2.02 properly converts AVCHD to AIC and removes 24p pulldown frames – I will probably just use that. Sure, there is a transcoding step from AVCHD to the AIC format. But it is darned hard to see any meaningful loss except for a very slight softening of the colors. Since my destination is eventually to MPEG4 files that I play on my HDTV any image losses in the AIC transcoding are irrelevant.

More info on AVCHD and also 24p is available in other posts on this web site. In other posts, I describe how you can use iMovie and the free program JES Deinterlacer to process hv20/hv30 24p, or AVCHD with 24p video frames.

For now, I’m likely to use Voltaic. It is not real fast but it does produce the best results for when you want to be picky about images.

Editing, Techniques

Handbrake – converting AVCHD to MPEG4

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I wrote in the past about dealing with AVCHD and 24p editing on the Mac OS X.

I just installed the latest version of HandBrake, the free video converter for Mac and it easily converted AVCHD directly to mpeg4 video files. Unfortunately, it does not know what to do with the 2:3 pulldown removal required for the 24p on my HG10. Still, if you’ve got 30p or 60i video in AVCHD and want to go direct to MPEG4, this would be a good solution.

Unfortunately, Quicktime doesn’t know what to do with the resulting mpeg4 file, but other programs, like VLC and MPEG Streamclip, played the mpeg4 file just fine. Go figure.

Update: I have been experimenting with Voltaic HD 2.0.2, which now correctly processes the 24p AVCHD files from my Canon HG10. I have successfully transcoded from AVCHD with 24p pulldown removal to AIC, Photo JPEG and uncompressed 4:2:2 and more.

  • Uncompressed 4:2:2, not surprisingly, gives the best result. But an 82 Mb 40 second input file becomes a 3.7 GB uncompressed file! The most noticeable change is enhanced saturated color in the 4:2:2 color scheme versus AIC and Photo JPEG – and some improvements in subtle color graduations that leave compression artificacts in AIC and Photo JPEG. But the huge file size makes this unusable.
  • It is very hard to tell much difference between AIC and Photo JPEG. They can pretty much be considered equivalent. The Photo JPEG codec definitely softened the colors while the AIC codec seemed to have a slight softening.  The quality, otherwise, is basically identical – however, the Photo JPEG version is about 1/3d smaller than the AIC file.
  • I  downloaded and used the free Avid DVxHD code. Transcoding to this codec produced results similar to uncompressed but with an 800 MB output file instead of 3.7 GB. Still, that is a ten times file expansion. I also used the AVID DV100 codec which produced a 446 MB file with better color than AIC but the compression issues seemed no better. The Avid Meridien codec produced slightly larger – but all AVID codecs had better color.
  • Conversion to HDV did not work, even though the original AVCHD is in 1440×1080. This appears to be a bug in Voltaic HD and this is supposedly a feature of Voltaic.
  • I also have an XDCAM 35 Mbps variable bit rate codec (1440×1080/24p) that I believe came with FCP version 5.x. Unfortunately, like HDV, this did not produce a proper output file. If it had, the file size would have been smaller than AIC and provided better compression and color than AIC.
  • The

At this point, for working with AVCHD/24p files that require pulldown removal, the highest quality will come from using Voltaic HD to transcode and do pulldown removal in one step (versus 2-transcode steps required in the iMovie–>AIC –> JES Deinterlace to inverse telecine –> AIC). As to which codec to use? I’ll probably stick to AIC.