Video-Editing Reviews

Do not bother with this program the same program different name.I would highly suggest this if you do not have Acid Music 3.0.One of the most stable music programs around.Alot better then any Magix program I have used. The publishing to the net is unbeatable and a great file rendering program too boot.

It's great software at a great price. I bought the program so I could rip and burn CD's but soon found that using the ACid program (2 software apps come in the box- Acid and Siren...I think these are the Sonic Foundry engines)I could also add a soundtrack to my home movies. The box also came with audio clips that I used to sequence a Blues song and that was fun too.

Creating music has never been easier. The interface is very clean and easy to follow. This is a great product if you want to make music. The editing tools are great. This program even comes with some cool loops to get one started. Check this product out!

Most affordable master edit deck. We use it as our central deck for input and output of dv media. We love it. We wish we had two but cannot afford it!!!

This is super great:

Description:
The miroVIDEO DC30 Pro is a professional, studio-quality video and audio editing system. It offers a fast, PCI interface and video overlay. It provides complete nonlinear post- production video and audio editing with full screen (up to 704 x 480, 60 fields), full motion video and audio capture and editing with Motion-JPEG compression and S-Video quality output to video tape through a convenient Breakout Box. Supports Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0.

Features:

Digital Video Format: MJPEG
Analog Video Format: NTSC, SECAM, PAL
Analog Video Signal: S-Video, Composite video
Video Capture Speed: 30 frames per second
Video Capture Resolution: 720 x 480
Still Image Format: JPEG
Color Depth: 24-bit (16.7M colors)

Technical Information:

System Type: PC
Form Factor: Plug-in card
System Requirements:

Required Slot Type: PCI
Package Contents:

Pinnacle Mirovideo DC30 PRO Video Capture/Editing
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As a computer professional, but first time PC/digital video user, I rate this product highly for several reasons.
The over 1/2" instruction manual is well written. The short automated tutorial is very good too. The video capture card (IEEE, i-LINK, whatever you want to call it) has 1 internal and 2 external ports which is handy. The cable is actually long enough to use. It configured easily in Windows XP Home.
The software detects every thing with ease and has a cool feature when connected to my new SONY TRV340 (see my review for it) that allows control of the camera from the screen.
I have captured Digital-8 video and video converted from my VHS tapes via my SONY into the PC and easily edited the video into some very nice home movies. Some of the special effects are very slick.
I have had no problems as mentioned by others in inserting from multiple captured videos. I have made up to hour long movies so far. It has more formats to output to than you would ever need and I haven't had one single failure (capturing, editing, or writing) yet. I must say it delivers everything it promises and is suprisingly user friendly.

excellent software!!! I've used studio since studio DV. I've owned studio 7 and 9 and struggled with the bugs knowing that they would be repaired sooner or later. The reason I jumped up from studio (which was filling my needs) is because of the crashes and unpredictability. Liquid Edition is ROCK solid. I have not lost an edit. Make no mistake, you have to learn this software to fully appreciate it's capabilities. I can't even say the number of times I said to myself when using Studio, I wish it did this or I wish it did that.... LE does this AND that. I would not recommend this product to someone new in editing. For that I would recommend Studio even with the bugs. I believe it's because of the bugs in studio that I really learned how to edit by doing work arounds. Liquid Edition is truly a couple if not three or four steps up from Studio. Multi video tracks, unlimited audio tracks, color correction, color filters, key framing 2d and 3d effects, dynamic time warp and the list goes on and on. It has all the pieces that I wished I had for years. I tried Adobe Premier. It's interface was not friendly (i'd say it was hateful). LE is pleasing to the eye and hey, no menues! I recommend getting the Mind Meld Liquid Edition DVD course. It saves alot of reading and answered most of my questions like, where is the wave form? and why can't I open the control panel when I'm in the logging tool. and the ever popular how do I capture DV with scene detection from the time code on my DV tape...

Any way it is expensive but it includes everything you'll need to edit a broadcast quality production. It will output to DVD as well as internet streaming files. Fabulous software. Get it..

Good product if you are going to use firewire peripherials only. Or you just need a fire wire hook up for a camera or camcorder. I have windows XP and it installed flawlessly and so did my camcorder subsequently. Ulead Video studio 6 se, the program that comes with the card is good but it almost never installs from the cd correctly. Don't even try, just copy the cd to a temperary folder on your hard drive and install from there.
Then get your free effects installed and then update with the patch and you won't have any trouble. I wish someone had put this out there I would have saved 2 days of bsing.

I bought this card from amazon when I ordered my DV camcorder at buydig.com. When I received them, I connected them with my computer up, and it is so easy and works great!
This package includes everything you need to connect DV to PC, the card, the 1394 cable and a software though I did not use that software.
Consider the price if you simply buy a 1394 cable from BestBuy, it is more than 10 or even 20 dollars!

Installed this card and it worked first try on a reasonably new Dell 8300 running XP. Took maybe 5 minutes TOTAL before I was capturing video. If the editing goes this well than this is an excellent product!

Reasons that this card only deserves one star:
1) The manual is only a small piece of paper with Mac instrution on one side and PC instructions on the other side. I think [amount]price should at least buy a piece of 8.5x11 letter paper.
2) No 1-800 tech support. I have to call long distance for some stupid questions.
3) This firewire card for notebook is not powered. So if your firewire device needs power, then by their great tech support guy, you have to buy a [amount] Orange Micro power supply cable, exclusively from their own website. Why don't they tell me this before?
4) This card couldn't connect Apple iPod to Thinkpad T23.

How many peripherals have you added to an old creaky computer that caused more problems than it fixed? Well the Orange Micro OrangeLink Firewire Cardbus PC Card isn't one of them. I installed the software on the Orange Micro CD, slid the PC card in and whamo!, I'm downloading music into my brand new iPod for Windows. No muss, no fuss. Everything in the PC domain should be so easy. And I'm talking a 4 year old Dell Inspiron. Maybe I won't switch to Mac after all.

My desktop computer came with two 1394 (Firewire) ports and I use them to download video from my Sony camcorder. I just pruchased a Compaq notebook that came with Windows XP home edition to edit video, digital pictures and burn CD's while traveling in Asia. I pluged the card in and Windows XP recoginzed it right away. I pluged my camcorder in to the Orange Micro OrangeLink Firewire 1394 PC Card and it worked just like it was pluged into my desktop. No problems. I would recommend this card to anyone who's notebook does not come with internal 1394 (Firewire) support. Basic information about my notebook: Compaq, AMD Duron 1.1 Ghz, 256 Mg Ram, 20 Gig HD, WinXp Home Ed.

I tried 3 different capture devices in one week, and this was by far the easiest to use and the most portable, with good quality images. Set up is simple, install discs, install Pinnacle Studio Version 9, which has a great instruction video for beginners on how to capture,edit and make movies. USB2 device, which I am using in conjunction with a laptop. Captured old analogue video images, and off many monitors at work with images I need to use for presentations. Reasonable price for what you get.

Hollywood FX Plus for Studio 7.x or higher is an excellent add on product.

Studio 7 and 8 are notorious for being unstable but if you can get them to work right, the addition of FX Plus will make your editing even more enjoyable.

You have many new affects with FX Plus. Some of the effects rival the Video Toaster or even broadcast quality products. You just have to see them to believe it.

One thing to note: you will really need a 3D Graphics card to help out with the most complex transitions. The software rendering on slower machines just causes most systems to crash.

If you have Studio 7.x or higher, you MUST get this add on.

The Screenblast Movie Studio is very easy to use and I had it doing video clips and transitions 10 minutes after opening the box. Installation was very smooth and the tutorial is quick and good enough to get you started. The manual that comes with the software is pretty good, but the HELP menu in the program itself is pretty much the way to go. Everything is drag-and-drop and making changes could not be any easier. I have used Adobe Premiere, Pinnacle 8, and a few other OEM bundled packages and Sony Screenblaster is so much easier to use and in most circumstances, has better looking transitions and effects.

You import video/pictures from any source and move it from the media pool to where you want it on the timeline. You can select transitions and view how each one works prior to incorporating it into your project. Doing that is drag-and-drop, just like everything else. Most of the production is just trial and error...select a transition or effect, drag it where you want it and hit play to see how it actually looks in the view screen. If you don't like it, click on it and delete and try something else. You will rarely need to use the help menu, everything is all laid out in from of you in a very organized and simple manner. I am totally in love with this product. The BAD side is the 3rd party DVD authoring from SonicFoundry. It crashes a lot and locks up everytime I select to burn a DVD straight from the camcorder. I have Nero 6 installed and it is not much better...most of the newer DVD authoring software is full of bugs. (I use Roxio and Nero and neither one works all that good either.)
Sony really has their act together on this product and I have already deleted the Pinnacle 8 program and will use this full time.
The Sony software is 5 stars. Because of the SonicFoundry DVD authoring software they choose to use, which has wasted a few of my blank DVDs, they loose a star for that. This is a great buy.

as an editing program movie studio can't be beat. i am constantly amazed at the feature set, and what is possible to do. it is very stable and never crashes. i rate the editing part of the package (the movie studio software itself) 5 stars. very good value for the money.

the dvd authoring is another story. despite the advertisements, authoring is not integrated and is handled by sonic mydvd v4.5, a very limited and disappointing program. that's why i marked the overall package 4 stars.

movie studio can almost handle 16:9 editing. all of the needed features for 16:9 are available during the editing process, the only hitch comes when encoding to mpeg-2 in order to create a dvd. this requires a workaround involving a free program called dvdpatcher to set the correct aspect ratio on the mpeg file before authoring. this only takes a second so it isn't a big deal.

i honestly think movie studio is the best "consumer" (under $100) editing program available.

I've used Adobe Premiere in the past, excellent but too expensive, I tried Ulead what a horrible experience, pinnacle reviews said crash after crash. Based on the reputation of Video Vegas I gave this product a try and it is really excellent.

I've used it so far to create 2 online projects for work documenting team meetings and posting the video online. It's easy to work with different pieces of the timeline and then output them in an appropriate format like Windows Media 9.
Excellent integration with external codecs - quicktime, wmv, mpeg1 and 2, and real video. The only drawbacks I've found so far are no control over the output only fixed templates. For example if you wanted to fine tune the audio bit rate, SB will not let you do that. Oh well I guess it is an entry level package. Secondly, the outputted MPEG is a little bit halo prone. It's supposed to be main concept encoder, but since you are not allowed to tune it at all, there's no way to fix it.

Lastly the NTSC mpeg2 video it creates is actually non-compliant for DVD production, since it only supports mpeg audio. In the US you really should output either PCM or AC3 Stereo. Neither of those are an option. I've filed a bug against Sony, but they have not responded. If sony would allow a little more control over the output I would definitely give this package 5 stars.

First the pros: excellent stability, very easy to use capture, good editing capability, easy to generate output.
Cons: lack of control over output.