# Video Editing and Publishing Software



## Chaos is Born (May 16, 2007)

What Video editing and Publishing Software do you use?

I have used Vegas 5 in the past and found it to be limiting...
I am now working with Pinacle studio 9 and find it is great for both editing and publishing except for the rendering time factor... Had a machine dedicated to rendering a full length dvd took 8 hours... 

Anyone have any experiance working with Pinacle that has been having this issue and how did you solve it?


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## icewolf08 (May 17, 2007)

No experience with Pinacle. But, to answer your original question, I use Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. Not to start another Mac v. PC discussion, but along with Avid it is the industry standard for digital editing.

Here is a quote for you:
"Most of the shots that we're talking about, which are the space battle shots at the end of the movie, were actually done on a Macintosh, the kind of thing that almost anybody can do." 
~ George Lucas, on the refurbishment of the Star Wars trilogy


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## mbenonis (May 17, 2007)

I haven't done much video editing for a while, but the last time I did I used Final Cut. My apartment-mate, however, edits feature-length films and swears by Primere.


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## Chaos is Born (May 17, 2007)

icewolf08 said:


> No experience with Pinacle. But, to answer your original question, I use Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. Not to start another Mac v. PC discussion, but along with Avid it is the industry standard for digital editing.


I haven't gotten to use Final Cut Pro on my mac yet, i was using what my father was using... basically he is full PC.
In my honest opinion i agree that MACs are the way to go for anything multimedia editing though, i've only been working with one for five months with my photography and my workflow is way up cause of it.


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## 6ftstudios (May 17, 2007)

Personally, I've used Pinacle & Premiere. Premiere was fine, but I had never ending problems with Pinacle. For the little bit i've done since I've gotten my Mac i've just used iMove.

Our company will be starting an internship soon and each intern with a film-making will get a new mac with finalcut express (for small projects), but also have access to Final Cut Pro.


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## PadawanGeek (May 17, 2007)

Adobe Premiere Pro for regular video editing and importing.
Adobe After Effects for special effects (like lightsabers)
Adobe Encore DVD 2.0 for publishing (ex. DVD menus)

That is pretty much all of the software I use for movies... and I love it all!

P.S. Premiere Pro is a lot better that Premiere.


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## Thefoxygranpa (May 17, 2007)

I purchased Pinnacle and had nothing but headaches come out of it. It wouldn't not recognize my camera ever. Tech support was awful, they did nothing to help me. After half a dozen calls I was finally told I would recieve a refund and they would call me in a week. 

Yep...that was in Jan. , still no call from them 

I have recently gotten Premiere Pro and I'm looking forward to using it...


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## PadawanGeek (May 17, 2007)

evanriley said:


> I have recently gotten Premiere Pro and I'm looking forward to using it...



A good way to get a quick start on Premiere Pro is to get a Total Training DVD. They're great for learning about the software.


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## leistico (May 25, 2007)

I use Vegas 4 personally... I love it, and it pretty much maxes out on my rig. In fact, I'm doing "Proof" right now on stage, and I did video effects for pre/inter/CC and post show, and I used Vegas 4 to put together animations and run them through our video projector. Works nicely, and more versatile than a powerpoint presentation.


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## Pie4Weebl (Jun 8, 2007)

I swear by Premiere, its nice once you pair it up with a raid 0 array in your computer.


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## PadawanGeek (Jun 8, 2007)

Pie4Weebl said:


> I swear by Premiere, its nice once you pair it up with a raid 0 array in your computer.



I have a couple of 250GB had drives that we put in RAID 0 on my computer.


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## astrotechie (Nov 30, 2007)

I use and own Avid Media Composer, Sorenson Squeeze, and Roxio Media Creator.
Also I own, but hate using, is Adobe Premiere Pro. 
I recommend Avid Media Composer. Great tool.


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## cvanp (Dec 1, 2007)

I read an article today suggesting not to use Premiere Pro because of some audio restriction - I'll try to dig up the link and edit my post and add it back in later.

Personally, I use Final Cut Studio 2 now and love it - it's nice to learn the other industry standard (aside from Avid). However on Windows I wholeheartedly recommend Vegas Pro 8, the newest version of Vegas. Once you understand the full concepts of timeline-based editing, something that Pinnacle lacks at (in my opinion) you'll find that Vegas is a good starting ground to learn non-linear editing and it is amazingly flexible. In fact, until Apple ports Final Cut over to Windows, Vegas is the only editing software on Windows that I can recommend. It is fast, efficient, well designed, and powerful.

Chris


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## kwotipka (Dec 2, 2007)

I recently had to do an offline for a project I was working on. Since no one really offers offline editing anymore, I figured I would give FCP a shot. Now, the last time I had to really edit something was around 10 years ago on a Premiere 6 box (Matrox RT2000). It was painful as sin. I am told that Prem. Pro is much better now.

I loaded up FCP Studio 2 into my wife's macbook and went to work on some MPEG4 clips. The only thing that required rendering was bringing the sample rate of the audio track up to match the timeline. This took in total about 10 minutes.

The interface and editing features were very easy to use and had tons of great features like the ability to set a loop at an edit point so you could trim the edit better.

Recently, I went to an Apple sponsored program on the new ProRes codec and the Color software. I was very impressed with both. So, now I am saving my coins to get a MacBook Pro so I can play with my 10bit422 stuff. I'll let you know how that goes.

kw


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## PadawanGeek (Dec 3, 2007)

Why all this anti-Premiere Pro? Audio restrictions? It works great for me....

I got the whole production suite and i love it... what's so bad about premiere pro that i'm missing?


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## kwotipka (Dec 3, 2007)

PadawanGeek said:


> Why all this anti-Premiere Pro? Audio restrictions? It works great for me....
> I got the whole production suite and i love it... what's so bad about premiere pro that i'm missing?



Spoke to a friend of mine today who uses Prem Pro. He gives it high marks and never has had a problem with it. I think that the issue is that the older versions (6 and under) had a really bad UI and were prone to crash more then usual. He did mention that since his was an older system (4years) that he was considering making the move to mac / FCP in the future.

Lucas said it best (paraphrasing here): Tools are tools, it's how you use them that counts.

kw


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## reddawnman (Jan 13, 2008)

Final Cut Studio 2 here as well. I am forced to use premiere pro on a client's PC and I can't wait to get home to my hackintosh (Built out of pc parts).

The ProRes codec is very nice, but keep in mind that HDV is a 4:2:0 standard so you won't be getting the full effect. However, if you need to green screen ProRes is the best way to do the key.

Most people of my generation have FCP on their resume, fewer with avid or premiere.

I'm a big apple fanboy, so I'll shut up now.


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## TimMiller (Feb 15, 2008)

Right now i am editing a video using vegas movie studio 6.0. I first learned digital video editing in an avid studio and have gotten fully spoiled. (yes i have done plenty of the old school editing of cutting and splicing 1" tape and running it through a character generator with a waping 80k of memory!!!) I have also used final cut pro along with aftereffects. What a sweet program. It also ran pretty fast as far as rendering. Right now with vegas, it renders a little faster than real time on my P4 3Ghz computer with 2gigs of ram. I also have all SATA drives so its not hurting for speed. My biggest problem i'm running into with vegas (its a great software package for the money), is that i had to edit a bunch of pics into the movie, and it does not want to move large chucks of pics all sequenced to time code very well. It wants to garble them all up. So the workaround i have found for this problem is to render the pic sequence as a movie, then delete out all the individual pics and add the rendered movie in instead. But that is the biggest problem i have found.... Hope this helps.


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## soundop (Apr 5, 2008)

ok, im in highschool, but i have experince with the three major video editing, DO NOT USE AVID, i have learned that it is more emitional (no offense to any girls) then a pmsing bipolar girl, if you do use avid, allow 2-3 extra days, as i can gurentee anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Adobe premier Pro CS3, i have the whole cs3 pack, i love cs3, it has a very easy user interface, just remember to lock and unlcok your video tracks, and fading together is a little weird, until you get the hang of it.

Final Cut Pro, is a really good program, as lng as you have studio, and a large extternal hard drive.



adobe is my recomendation. (i "own" cs3, and avid and edited a movie on final cut with a friend, ive used avid or two years, and adobe for 1)


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## forbiddenpluto (Apr 5, 2008)

Trained in college on Final Cut Pro and lucky enough to have it at my HS too.


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## erosing (Apr 5, 2008)

So my first question to the TC reguarding rendering times is what are your hardware specs...that'll make a big difference. 

As for what I use, FCP for the last 3 years. But I"ve been schooled on Adobe and Pinacle actually, but I prefer FCP all around.


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## lieperjp (Apr 6, 2008)

FCP is the way to go - it was relatively easy to learn and very powerful, especially when paired up with Garage Band and Firetype. And this coming from a PC guy. We used it in high school on a top of the line mac, though... I've never used any windows versions, so I couldn't tell you.


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## soundop (Apr 8, 2008)

Another advantage to fcp is apples motion


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## BingemanJ (Jul 18, 2009)

Im in love with Vegas Pro 9.. I do a lot of live show DVDs and i find that the workflow in Vegas 9 is phenomenal in comparison to Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro...I have had access to editing suites running Avid, Edius, Final Cut Pro, and Premiere and i still swear by Vegas 9...one of the best products out there on the market...


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## NickJones (Jul 18, 2009)

Wow, old thread. Ah well, better add my opinon. I have Final Cut Pro Studio HD, and it runs beautifully on my Hackintosh, not only do you get FCP to edit, but you get motion for all your cool titles, menus, effects and making stuff look like lightsabers.
Nick


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## soundman1024 (Jul 31, 2009)

If it's taking 8 hours to render out a DVD you've got something wrong with your workflow or a machine that should have been retired a long time ago. I've had a dvd rendering at work, while I was working in Motion..and while I had an h.264 web compression going on in Compressor. The DVD was still done in under real time. That was an extraordinary case, I don't usually have that much going on, but still over real time rendering if that's all your doing seems a bit much.

If you're getting wild render times like that (4x real time??) you can bet something is wrong with the settings on your Studio 9 timeline.


As for what software I use, at work and school I use Final Cut Studio 2. If I were starting from scratch I'd go with Adobe's Creative Suite on a PC without a doubt. Final Cut Studio 3 just came out a week or two ago and it STILL isn't optimized for multiple cores. The only workaround for that is a quick cluster in Compressor - making a virtual render farm out of one machine for changing the format of an exported video only. They're about 2 years behind technologically I figure. Couple the outdated code with the stability issues I've had (with all of Final Cut Studio - Soundtrack Pro in particular - and OSX even) and it's a mystery to me why FCP is industry standard. I haven't used Premier extensively, but it has always worked fine for me when I have used it, and tight integration with After Effects would be very nice.


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## NickJones (Aug 1, 2009)

soundman1024 said:


> It's a mystery to me why FCP is industry standard. I haven't used Premier extensively, but it has always worked fine for me when I have used it, and tight integration with After Effects would be very nice.


Because all the cool people use Mac  I think it's actually because in the old days, Macs were used for all the photo stuff, and then video became possible, and all of the cool creative people were on Mac. I personally use anything I can get my hands on for video, I have a Hakintosh, but it's no the best for video as it's a pretty old machine, so I use Adobe Elements 7 for all my quick video stuff, as if you are just mixing between 2 camera angles, I see no reason to use FCP as Elements can do it just as well.
Nick


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