Digital video software is still far from user-friendly
by
Alan Zisman (c) 2005 First published in
Business
in
Vancouver July 19-25, 2005;
issue 821; High Tech Office column
Working with digital cameras and photos is pretty mainstream these
days. But what about video?
I had 12 minutes of footage on a
Sony
Handycam and wanted to end up with it on a DVD or video CD disc,
ideally playable both on standard DVD players and on computer. No fancy
editing or special effects needed, though a title screen and optional
menu would be a plus.
Most digital camcorders include a Firewire (called iLink on Sony models
or IEEE 1394) connector. This makes it easy to connect the camera to a
computer - at least one with a Firewire port. All recent Macs include a
Firewire port. It was easy to add a $35 PCI Firewire card to my
Seanix desktop. And
the card included
ULead Video
Studio DV 5 software. The ($100)
LG
DVD burner I had previously added to the computer bundled
CyberLink Power
Producer software, and Windows ME and XP include
Microsoft's Windows
Movie Maker software. I tried out all three, along with
Apple's iMovie and
iDVD on a Mac.
Each recognized the camcorder and did a reasonable job of importing the
raw video footage from the camcorder (though it took me a while to
discover the small, unlabelled camera icon in the ULead software). Each
included buttons to rewind, play, pause or stop the video camera.
But what to do next was not always so apparent.
Power Producer appeared to offer a one-stop solution, not only
capturing the video, but also promising to create a multi-chapter
production and burn it to VCD or DVD. But the menu creation was
cumbersome. Even worse, the DVD player displayed the opening screen but
wouldn't get past it.
On the plus side, it optionally adds a player that automatically runs
when the disk is inserted into Windows PCs.
When Video Studio started up, a help file automatically popped up. This
seemed annoying but turned out to be vital: the user interface is very
obscure. As well, options are labelled with technical terms with no
explanation (not even in the help file) leaving this non-expert user
puzzled as how to choose between, for example, AVI 720x480 DV NTSC and
MPEG-1 352x240 NTSC.
I couldn't find any options to burn the resulting file to disc.
Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker interface was much easier to use. It
automatically split the captured footage into scenes, though it didn't
offer any obvious ways to edit the scene selection. That didn't matter,
though.
In the end, it (very slowly) burned the resulting footage to CD as a
single Windows Media format file; no menu, no chapter headings. That
would have been OK, but the resulting disc played fine on a Windows PC,
and not at all on my DVD player.
I was able to take the saved files from both Video Studio and Windows
Movie Maker and convert them into the version of Nero that had come
with my DVD burner. There I discovered that the higher-quality Super
VCD disc option was only available with a paid upgrade version. The
standard VCD discs played (with a lower but OK resolution) on my DVD
player.
Moving over to the Mac, Apple's iMovie was similar but slicker than
Windows Movie Maker. It offered to send the captured footage to
stable-mate iDVD, which, however, I found confusing. Again, I had to
poke around in iDVD's help files to learn how to add images to the
"drop zones" for the menu page.
And when I burned the project, the 12 minutes of video turned into over
two GB of files - far too large for a video CD. (iMovie has an option
to "share" the movie in a variety of slimmer QuickTime formats, sans
iDVD's fancy title and chapter headings).
My conclusion: be prepared for some work whether you're wanting to send
vacation footage to Grandma or make a sales video for the boardroom.