MEDIASTUDIO 6.5 "Best" According To VIDEOMAKER

[Jerry Jones]

VIDEOMAKER MAGAZINE

February 2002 Issue

Best Video-Editing Software Over $100

Ulead MediaStudio Pro 6.5
This was another of the most hotly contested awards and you really would not be making a mistake going with any of the year’s offerings in this category. While the foundation of the decision to give this award to MediaStudio Pro 6.5 was based in the long-time quality and stability of the environment, it was the excellent advanced capture features and scene detection that really won us over. The built-in MPEG-2 encoding and new DVD-authoring features set MSP 6.5 apart from the rest as well.
$495 http://www.ulead.com (310) 896-6388

http://www.videomaker.com/scripts/article.cfm?id=8701

[Dr Mordrid]

No shock there. Even though I have to use Premiere6 with my RT-2000 it doesn't mean I like it

IMHO its main competition, Premiere6, is a buggy, slow, unstable POS. Yes, it has some nice features like virtual clips...but those aren't worth the aggrevation.

Dr. Mordrid

[Brian Ellis]

Doc

I tried P5 alongside MSP5.2 a year or so ago: there was no comparison. Now I have MSP6.5, Première can take a long walk on a short pier. I have little doubt it is superior, although I haven't even tried P6.

By the way, I wonder how many sales Matrox have lost by making the RT2xxx series unusable with the better product? I know I would never consider buying anything with which I could not use the editor I wished.

[farid]

Uh... you guys are still here ?

Come over and join the fun on the Sofo VV3 page http://www.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/s...cfoundry_vegas

Don't know about MSP6.5, but Premiere6 is way out of the picture compared to Vegas Video 3.0. I still to "unlearn" some bad habits I picked over the last 5 years in Premiere and I even became somewhat addicted to it, but hope to be cured real soon with VV3.

Farid

[Jerry Jones]

Sorry...

I downloaded the Vegas Video 3.0 trial and gave it a chance, but it wasn't "fun."

But I'll keep the demo on my hard drive and maybe it'll grow on me.

[Rick6612]

Hi All,

I recently picked up an RT2500 and I am starting to try to learn Premiere... man I miss MSP! I keep telling myself that I just need to get used to how things work in Premiere as opposed to MSP, but the more I get used to it, the more I know it just blows compared to MSP.

Rick

[Ted222]

Rick,

I am thinking of picking up an RT2500 in the next few weeks. How do you like the picture quality? Features? Etc? Is it worth the money?

thanks,

Ted

Dell Demension 4100
P3-1000
512 RAM
45 gig System Win98SE/2000 Dual Boot
27 gig Secondary Drive
90 gig Promise (3-30 gigs)
G450eTV
CD rw
Pioneer A03
Turtle Beach

[Dr Mordrid]

Speaking for the output quality: GORGEOUS.

Features: well over 1600 effects and counting, 60 of which are realtime Premiere transitions. Also realtime blurs, DVE's bump filters, organic wipes, page rolls, picture in picture etc. etc. etc.

The betas have been bugging Matrox for realtime chromakey as well, but not yet. It might just happen though as the Flex3D engines potential hasn't even been scratched.

It's 4:4:4:4 RGBA compositing engine make for very pretty pictures when you add effects. This is the one thing that really makes the quality come out.

What's cooler is you can use the AVISynth scripting language to frameserve the timeline straight to TMPGEnc for MPEG encoding. No disk file necessary. Talk about pretty MPEG's....

Yes, it's worth the money, if only for that composting engine. But you still have to tolerate Premiere to use it.

Tip: it requires a very stable system. Stick to the components list on Matrox's site as a guide.

Also: if you use the system for other "activities" as well you might want to dish out for a removable drive bay and a couple of drawers. Put your "normal" setup on one boot drive and your editing stuff on the other.

Works for me and keeps the "riff-raff" software and plugins out of the editing OS.

Dr. Mordrid

[Rick6612]

Hi Ted,

Obviously, the Doc has a lot more experience with the RT2500 than I do, so I don't think there is much I can add to what he said, except to add my own personal experiences so far.

First of all, I didn't know what a Blue Screen Of Death looked like in Windows 2000 until after I installed the RT2500 and Premiere. Now I've already seen 3 or 4 of them in the couple of weeks I've had the RT2500. "Page fault in non-paged area" seems to be the most popular.

Premiere is kind of strange to work with if you're used to MSP. It does a lot of weird things that I find frustrating. For example, I'm accustomed to putting a clip on the timeline in MSP and having it go where I put. In Premiere, it always seems to want to snap to the end of the previous clip on the same track. Maybe there is a setting to make it more like MSP that I just haven't looked for yet. But the point is there are just a lot of little things that are different from what I'm used to.

The video quality seems to be very good. At least it doesn't seem to have the field order problems like I was having with my G400 Marvel. Unfortunately, I don't yet have a good DV video camera, which I suppose is what I need to really see how good the video looks! So far I've just been experimenting by capturing videos from VHS tapes just to have something to work with to learn how to use it.

Overall I'm happy so far. I haven't seen a BSOD in a few days, so I am hoping that I've got all the bugs worked out.

Rick

http://www.Hogans-Systems.com

[Rick6612]

If anyone is interested, I have a follow up to my previous comments about the RT2500.

I finally finished capturing a bunch of music videos from store bought VHS tapes. I edited them together in Premiere, replacing the low quality VHS HiFi audio with audio extracted from CDs. Then I rendered them out to IBP format MPEG .avi files, pulled them into DVDit! and created a DVD image. Then I took the DVD image to my friend's house... my friend just picked up one of those HP DVD+RW drives for $499 at Best Buy. We copied the DVD image onto his system and burned a DVD.

My friend and I were both VERY impressed with the results. Especially consdering that all I started with was VHS tapes! There was virtually no loss in image quality on the finished DVD compared to the original tapes. And the CD audio sounded much better than the VHS HiFi audio of the original tapes.

I also played the videos from my computer and recorded them on S-VHS tape. The S-VHS tape showed slightly more noise and a slight loss of sharpness compared to the DVD, but still it was quite nice looking.

We were watching this on my friend's 70" Mitsubitchy TV, which has a very sharp, clear picture, and has always been notorious for showing off the lack of sharpness, the graininess and other imperfections in my videos I made in the past using my Marvel. I used to make videos on my Marvel and I'd think they looked so good on my 50" TV, but then I'd take 'em to my friend's house and play them on his huge 70" and I'd end up being so disappointed. But not this time! The RT2500 really came through!

The only problem now is the DVD we burned (which played fine in my friend's Pioneer DVD player) won't play in my APEX 660. Well, it started to play the first time I put it in. I selected a song from the menu and it played through the song just fine. When it got to the end of the song, I expected it to go to the next song on the disc. Instead the screen went black. I thought maybe I set up something wrong in DVDit. But then the APEX sat there making all kinds of noises like it was struggling to read the disc. Finally, a message came up saying "DISC ERROR." After that happened, the APEX will no longer read the DVD+RW disc at all. It still plays store bought DVDs, but it will have nothing to do with the DVD+RW disc.

I guess things were going too good to last for very long!

Rick

[Ted222]

Rick,

Thanks much for the last two replies, they were very informative to me. I have a Pioneer A03 which I will be burning DVD's and VCD's on. I believe I am going ahead with my RT2500 purchase, even though I have been reading about lots of problems in the RT forums. Everything is a "trade-off".

Now, I need to get a big screen TV to watch my videos on......


Ted

[Dr Mordrid]

Just make sure you have a very stable system before installing the RT-2500, even if this means a fresh install of Windows. If it's Win2K then install SP-2 as well.

DirectX8.1 is also a good idea BEFORE installing Premiere and then the LATEST RT drivers. 250 meg download here guys

One thing that can make Premiere6 a *bit* more stable is to go into its setups and set the undo buffers to 3 (default = 20!). As these buffers fill up your free physical RAM goes into the toilet, leaving Premiere (which is VERY much a memory hawg) nowhere to run...literally. It then bogs down to the point you think it's locked up, even though it hasn't.

No, Premiere don't manage memory well at all

Dr. Mordrid

[wkulecz]

Ted222,

Keep us informed as to how the Pioneer A03 burner works out.
Back in Oct, I found compatability with existing players to be poor once you got away from Pioneer or Sony brand players, so I returned mine. Most players (90%+) accepted the DVD-R disks, but few played them back wihtout glitches, and/or broken FF/REV, and/or navigation problems.

Mine had firmware 1.55, I see they are up to 1.65 last time I looked. I'm hoping there is a fix in the firmware or authoring software for the problems I'd seen.

--wally.

[Brian Ellis]

Wally

In my experience, it is not confined to DVD-R but even to some commercial DVD videos. I don't have many (I think about 8) but 3 of them glitch, at some point. Granted, all 3 are cheapies. I have only 2 feature films from big studios and they both play perfectly (I don't watch enormous amounts of entertainment video - and the cinema industry would have been bankrupt if they depended on my wife and myself. It must be 25 years since we last set foot in a cinema. Just in case you think this is cultural snobbery, I do watch TV, which is probably a lot worse, although my preference is for documentaries and the odd BBC sitcom but my pet hate is soaps).

OTOH, I have no glitches on home-generated VCDs/SVCDs. Who knows, Santa may leave me a DVD writer next Christmas? I'll be able to report my experiences on that medium, then.

[wkulecz]

Brian, up until this weekend I've never seen a glitch on a comercially mastered DVD. We've over 100, and like you I prefer documentaries and old BBC TV shows.

Got a new HP notebook running XP with builtin DVD-CD/RW combo drive. While watching a Monty Python DVD while I was waiting for a plane, I saw two brief glitches. I'll be on the lookout next time I play that disk to see if its a bad disk (i.e. glitches on all players in the same spot), an infrequent basically random event that I may not see again for another two years, or an XP DVD playback problem.

--wally.