Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

Product Category: Video Conversion Software

Manufacturer: AVS4YOU

Where to Buy: AVS4YOU.com

Price: $59 for Unlimited Access or $39 for 1 Year Access

System Requirements: Windows Vista, Windows XP, 512MB of RAM or higher (1GB of RAM for Vista), and 1.5GHz or higher CPU (3Ghz/1.8Ghz Dual Core for Vista)

Pros:

• Simple easy to use interface;
• Included profiles make it easy for people with limited video editing experience;
• Priced right.

Cons:

• Conversion times seemed a bit slow;
• Changing the priority for the conversion seemed to have little effect on the CPU usage or the overall conversion time for the PC I used while testing.

Summary: AVS4YOU is currently offering all of their software titles for one amazingly low price. Is the software worth it? To find out I take one of their flagship products for a spin. Read on to find out what I discovered.

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"It's your story to tell, so make it unforgettable with Corel Digital Studio 2010. Taking a revolutionary approach to photo editing and movie making software, this new multimedia software gives you all the applications you need in one box. And they all work together. Organize all your digital media in one place, effortlessly edit photos, burn music and turn your video clips into movies in just minutes. Got the latest technologies? Digital Studio also supports HD video and Windows® 7. The best part is sharing your memories with the people you care about-on popular websites like FacebookTM, Flickr and YouTubeTM, on professional-quality CDs, DVDs or high-definition AVCHDs, and on your favorite mobile device, including iPod®, iPhone® and PSP®."

I look at a lot of software used for editing digital photos and videos, and much of it is either too complex to recommend to friends and family, or it's too limited to be of any use to me. Corel walked me through a demo of this software last week, and I have to admit, I was impressed - based on what I saw I can see my family using this, and some of the functions are so quick and easy I can see myself using it as well. The suite is actually four different applications: Corel PaintShop Photo Express 2010, Corel VideoStudio Express 2010, Corel WinDVD 2010, and Corel DVD Factory 2010. This page has all the details, but suffice it to say that it's a very full-featured package - you can edit and organize photos, edit videos (including AVCHD), and create photo books, calendars, and more. It's been certified compatible with Windows 7, and can be purchased for $99 USD/$99 CAD. There's a free trial, so check it out. A few screen shots of the software are after the break, and watch for a review coming next week. Read more...

"Well, with the release of the final shipping version of Windows Live Movie Maker 1.0, those days are behind us. And what we see is a product that is much more in keeping with the lofty expectations that were established with its predecessors, but reimagined for the needs of today. It's the right movie editing and sharing solution at the right time, and if you've been collecting short home movies and scads of photos but weren't clear on how you could get them in front of friends and family in a quick and easy but high quality way, look no further."

The original Windows Movie Maker that came with Windows Millenium Edition was much maligned as was the OS that came with it. It has been nine years, and while many have dismissed it as a toy editor, Microsoft is hoping to change that with its latest iteration. Paul Thurrott gives a pretty thorough review of Windows Live Movie Maker, taking the time to point out some very neat features such as 1080p support, easy video creation and even YouTube integration. If you're looking for a free program that makes home movies and have Vista or Windows 7, check out the review!

"Today, we are going to discuss both of these technologies as well as benchmark a couple video transcoding applications from Cyberlink that support both CUDA and ATI Stream platforms. We will also take a brief look at ATI's Avivo video converter to see what ATI's own free software has to offer."

With AMD's recent release of an x86 compatible SDK for OpenCL, it is only fitting to see someone pit the two GPGPU platforms against each other to see if either provides a significant advantage. Both platforms perform admirably, and the most important thing to take away from the article is that if you do a lot of rendering or transcoding, investing in a GPGPU can save you buckets of time, freeing your computer up for more important things like posting tweets or playing Music Catch.

"Our biggest problem with Premiere Elements is that it suffers a host of problems (both minor and major). The first glitch occurred when we were trying to capture HDV footage via FireWire from a Canon HV10. The app's preview screen would simply stop showing the preview footage. The content would capture, but we could not watch it as it was captured. OK, not a show stopper. More serious was our inability to burn more than one hour of HD footage to a Blu-ray disc. The app would either hang or reboot Windows Vista 64-bit. And it's not like we didn't bring enough firepower. We tested using this month's Gateway FX6800 (page 76), which was equipped with a 2.93GHz Core i7-940, Radeon HD 4870 X2, and 6GB of RAM."

Reading this review, I could only nod along with their findings - Premiere Elements 7 has a lot going for it, but it's ultimately plagued by bugs, strage behaviours, and limitations around codecs and file formats. I recieved a copy for review months ago, but my review notes read like a product-bashing session because I found more wrong with it than right. Believe it or not though, I'm still using it to produce the videos you see here - that's largely because I've set up templates in it and having to re-create those templates in another program would be a pain. Ultimately, Premiere Elements 7 as a program has a lot of potential, but it doesn't live up to it.

"The idea with GPU computing is to take highly parallelized tasks typically run in the CPU and offload them to the GPU, where they can run more quickly and efficiently. Programmable shaders are exceptionally well-suited for floating point-intensive tasks. Each shader operates as its own sort of processor core, so instead of having four or eight threads crunching on a parallelized task in the CPU, you could have 64 or 320 or however many stream processors tackling the same work in the GPU."

It took nearly two years for AMD to come out with a response to NVidia's CUDA platform and even at that, when ATI Stream was first released it was severely limited. AMD has finally released an update that puts ATI Stream much more in line with the competition. Toms Hardware takes the update for a spin and finds that there are still a few parts that need polishing. It's great to see GPUs getting more use since their parallel processing capabilities are astounding, CUDA still seems to have a considerable edge for varying applications which along with video and image processing can also do things such as PhysX.

"The Vegas Pro 9 collection integrates two powerful applications that work seamlessly together to provide an efficient and intuitive environment for video and broadcast professionals. This comprehensive suite offers the most robust and progressive platform available for content creation and production. With broad format support, superior effects processing, unparalleled audio support, and a full complement of editorial tools, the Vegas Pro 9 collection streamlines your workflow. From acquisition to delivery, from camera to Blu-ray Disc, the Vegas Pro 9 collection delivers exactly what you need to produce outstanding results."

The big updates with this new version of Vegas seem to be related to supporting newer video formats - specifically XDCAM EX and RED. Support for still images greater than one gigapixel in resolution has also been added - why you'd need something so impressive sounding is beyond me, but this is serious video editing software at $599 USD. What I was hoping to see - really, really hoping to see - what hardware acceleration, specifically of the NVIDIA CUDA variety.

NVIDIA has been beating their chest lately about all these "great" CUDA-accelerated software applications, but they're missing one very important piece of the puzzle: a real video editing suite. CUDA is a powerful advantage in the speed department, but so far Sony, Adobe, Pinnacle, or any other major video editing player has supported it in their applications - leaving the user with CPU-only video encoding, which no matter how fast your CPU, just isn't fast enough.

"Now, ripping DVDs is our great challenge. Copying and transcoding the disc’s video into more efficient formats involves math an order of magnitude scarier than what’s required to rip audio CDs. A machine that will rip the latest Miley Cyrus CD in mere moments could take hours to extract and convert your copy of Alien vs. Predator to an iPod-friendly format. But with the right software, a quad-core-equipped PC, and a little know-how, you can cut your disc-rip time from hours to 30 minutes. Plenty of tricks and traps still await first-time rippers, but we’ll show you the basics and then walk you through some of the most valuable power-user ripping secrets."

I actually don't see ripping DVDs as a great challenge, but I have had the pleasure of going through lots of different programs over the years to back up my library. For those of you just getting into the whole process, either for backing up, or to create an instant access media library for your home theater, Maximum PC has put up a fairly good tutorial that will probably save you a lot of time and effort. It's quite thorough and even covers Blu-ray discs if you've got any. It even touches on how to stream your new library around the house. The only part I find lacking is that it doesn't provide you with any instructions on how to stream outside of your domicile. All I can add to that is to consider services like orb.com, which can take your media library and make it available to you anywhere so long as you have an internet connection.

"Trying to rip DVDs to your home server consistently and without issue is not easy. After doing some research I came across a free application called HandBrake which is a fantastic video encoder and it just so happens that it can rip DVDs. However, HandBrake requires somebody to set it up each time you wish to rip a DVD. Obviously nobody is going to want to bother with that so I decided to write a small application which will do this automatically."

DVDs are a great media format. They can put up with a fair amount of abuse and pack away into a tiny little space. Still, they're not indestructable, so the need for backing up DVDs is important. Especially after you find your DVD player can't play half of your scratched DVDs. Handbrake is a program that lets you backup your DVDs onto your computer, and AutoBrake takes things a step further, automating much of the steps you need to take with HandBrake. Sure, it might only take a minute or two to do it yourself, but when you're ripping a couple dozen DVDs, you don't want to have to constantly come back to the computer for a couple minutes at a time. It's a small thing, but it really helps and frees you up on Backup Sunday.

"When NVIDIA went to a driver model that allowed consumers to update their notebook graphics drivers direct from NVIDIA, we enabled millions of notebook users to enjoy the benefits of our CUDA parallel computing architecture. One application that was released today that is a great example of how CUDA makes life better is vReveal from MotionDSP."

Up until now, most of what I had seen CUDA used for was enabling PhysX effects in gaming. This made sense since most computers with powerful (read: non-integrated) GPUs would be used for gaming at some point. This is the first use I've seen that makes CUDA more useful for your typical consumer. vReveal magically improves the quality, clarity and brightness of your videos. Instead of using traditional filters you would find in Photoshop or GIMP to do this, it takes the data from several frames to smooth and improve the current frame. If you watch the videos on the notebooks.com site, the effects can be quite dramatic. Getting back to CUDA, vReveal can technically run on any computer, but those with NVIDIA GPUs can see a several fold increase in speed because of CUDA. Unfortunately for most people who already have a laptop or desktop, I'm willing to bet its got an Intel integrated GPU. If you do a lot of video processing, this may just be the reason you need to get a new computer! That's a good reason, isn't it?

Product Category: Software

Manufacturer: TMPGEnc

Where to Buy: TMPGEnc Web site

Price: $99.95 USD

System Requirements: The software will work on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000. Since video encoding is a CPU-intensive task, the faster your CPU the faster the software will work.

Pros:

• A huge variety of video import and output formats;
• Makes great use of multi-core CPUs;
• Software is fast and responsive.

Cons:

• The cut/edit tools are confusing and limited;
• Seems to have trouble with certain AVI files, no support for KV files;
• Requires online product activation; EULA restricts you to one install (but see below).

Summary:If you're looking for the ultimate level of control when it comes to video encoding, TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress is one of the best tools on the market today. When you consider that you can purchase video editing programs such as Premiere Elements for $99, TMPGEnc seems fairly expensive at $99 - but if you're tired of the limited video encoding options that most consumer-level video editing programs offer, TMPGEnc is a breath of fresh air and well worth the investment. Read more...

"Corel VideoStudio® Pro X2 is an all-in-one video-editing software for creating high-quality HD and standard-definition movies, slide shows and DVDs. Edit video or photos quickly and easily using the Movie Wizard, or take full control with hands-on creative tools. Even paint, write or draw on your video. Burn your movies on DVDs, or high-definition AVCHD and Blu-ray discs. Share on PSP®, iPod® or iPhone®, upload directly to YouTube. Watch your movies on set-top players or with the included Corel® WinDVD®."

Formerly known as Ulead VideoStudio, Corel is slowly changing the Ulead brand into their own, and this latest release of VideoStudio looks like a solid one with exciting new features. One thing that caught my eye right away is that it's optimized for Intel Quad Core CPUs - meaning that when it's rendering video, I expect to see it happily using up all four cores to get maximum performance out of the CPU I'm using on my video editing computer. Compare that with Pinnacle Studio 12, which uses about 15% of my total CPU power when rendering video, and you can tell which one I'll likely prefer to use. Some other notable new features include the Painting Creator, which allows you to draw directly onto your video frames, and Smart Proxy editing which allows you to work quickly and easily with HD video clips by only changing the parts that it needs to change - meaning less overall system load. With the full version costing $99, this is a compelling alternative to Adobe Premiere Elements.

As a side note, I registered an account at Corel's Web site to download the trial version (I'm in Seattle right now, and the my press copy of the software is at home), only to be directed to a download page at CNET, so I felt a little tricked - go to the CNET download page and grab the file yourself. This system is still better than Sony's system though where, when you download a trial version of their video editing software, they force you to register the software before you can use it. I find it quite impressive that the software was just released yesterday and it already has 1.9 million downloads at the time of this writing.

The full press release is after the break. Read more...

"VideoStudio 11.5 Plus is video editing and DVD authoring software for anyone who wants to easily produce professional-looking videos, slideshows, and DVDs. Work quickly with intuitive wizards, or express your creativity with hands-on editing tools. Share your movies everywhere, on iPods, YouTube, or the latest HD home theater systems, with full support for AVCHD, Blu-ray and HD DVD discs."



It's not often you see much thunder about dot releases, but this 11.5 release has a significant number of new features in it. The direct to YouTube upload feature caught my eye, because I use that a great deal with Premiere Elements - when it's not crashing on me. The full text from the press release is after the break. Read more...