Video editing, is it intentionally sucking my time?

Frustrations in video land

Published on July 23, 2006 By Draginol In Personal Computing

So you want to make a DVD eh? Well good luck. Because no matter what you do, no matter your expertise, it's going to take up time. A lot of time. Whether it be a Mac or a PC, video editing, from the moment you hook up a cam corder to your PC to the actual burning of the final DVD seems destined to suck your life force out.

Why is that anyway? I've talked to a lot of people on this and it's the same story -- the software that manipulates video in any way shape or form seems intentionally slow and unresponsive. It's ridiculous.

I have spent the better part of 2 days (off an on) trying to get TIVO movies onto DVD. There are cheap/free ways of doing it that look even more painful but for $50 I decided to just pick up Roxio's MyDVD. I've managed to get several blue screens, weird crashes, and when it does work, it's incredibly slow and unresponsive to the point where I could be waiting several minutes for it to open a given directory. Not that the Mac is any better. I originally got a new Mac for a similar purpose and its software was just as unresponsive (though much better designed -- yes, that's iDVD 6 and iMovie though in their favor they're not nearly as flakey but they can't do Tivo recordings or yet handle the new camcorders that use mini-DVDs).

It's just maddening how much time is wasted on this stuff. It shouldn't be this slow and inefficient to simply make a DVD of movies.

Comments

Adamness

on Jul 23, 2006

I know what you mean. I've had to make a couple videos for school, and it took 2 minutes to add a fade between scenes. I had to add 5 or 6. Not the end of the world, but it slows down the 'creative process.' And I'm not playing around with some crap computer. 3.4GHZ, 1GB RAM, 128MB vid card.

It seems the hardware is plenty capable of handling video editing, but the software needs a major leap foward to keep up with it.

Keikonium

on Jul 23, 2006

I have a 3.6GHZ, 512 ram, nvidia chip, and with Nero I can make a DVD movie (from an avi file or two) in about an hour

. Maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't seem to bad to me. Its nice a quick, and I can burn them to DVD flawlessly. They play on my PS2, and in regular DVD players no problem.

Perhaps what you guys are doing with the fades and transitions is whats making it slow, cause I don't use those. I do make intro screens and such. I have a little over 60 GB of video in my "My Videos" folder, and it opens faster than my music folder lol (1.3 GB and far more files).

Could you possibly cancel out any unneed programs to free up some memory while doing these tasks?

Nakor

on Jul 23, 2006

I bought MyDVD as soon as it became useful to transfer shows from my Tivo. It worked well for awhile, albeit with a frustrating UI and a tremendous amount of time to transfer and reencode everything (nevermind the directory limitations for files). Lately, I've been unable to get it to work properly. The 2Ghz Opteron/2GB will literally shut down in the midst of transcoding, including if I kill off everything extraneous first.

bmetelsky

on Jul 23, 2006

I can definitely relate. Way too time consuming in my estimation. I actually thought that using Windows Movie Maker might work well - what a joke. I tried a few other programs and am now fairly competent using Pinnacle Studio 8. Anything after version 8 was too bloated for me. I still hate the amount of time it takes to put it all together, though.

I recently have been experimenting moving video off my DVR (a Motorola DCT6412 III) and am quite happy with the first few DVD's that I put together - no editing there, though, just a straight copy.

Draginol

on Jul 23, 2006

Keiko - if your content is already in AVI, you'ere half way there already. But even an hour is too long in my opinion.

Everything about it, from the software to the actual encoding to editing and manipulating is all so time consuming compared to anything else. I can just see days wasted.

And I haven't even started to get to the stuff that isn't already on the computer where I need to get it there via Firewire. Oye.

Double Zero

on Jul 24, 2006

Well...1 hour isnt all that bad considering the volume of information being converted to different formats for burning to a readable DVD... at least I dont think so...and I think that time will be cut down as technology moves forward.. Processors get even faster..etc..etc.. Burning a movie only takes minutes..it's the conversion that takes time, im using a 3gig pentium w/a gig of RAM and I can usually get a 2 hour movie converted from AVI format to VOB or Mpeg format and burned in about an hour, sometimes a little less.. Although, you can put 5-6 hours of video on a standard 4.7 gig DVD, the conversion process of course takes a bit longer then.. It takes my machine about 2 1/2 hours to convert and burn about 7 gigs of info to a 4.7 gig disk...thats actually not bad.. As someone pointed out..a 3D render in some of the more popular graphics programs can take 8 hours or more, for just a background/wallpaper, etc,etc...So an hour or two to convert and burn an entire movie just doesnt seem all that unreasonable..LoL.. I use a program called *Convert X To DVD* From the "propaganda" (LoL) I have read, it is supposed to be one of the fastest programs out there presently, and it is pretty reasonable in price, about $35 USD... Heres a link http://www.vso-software.fr/products/convert_x_to_dvd/ It has a ton of nice features, Menu Editing, Menu Background options..etc..etc.. A built in transcoder which is what makes it possible to add more than 4.7 gigs of info to the menu and burn it to a single disk.. Plus it does convert and burn from more than 1 format..such as AVI..it may work with the files your getting from your Tivo, cutting your conversion time on half (no need to convert twice) Hope it helps... Z.

Jafo

on Jul 24, 2006

I think the entire system revolving around DVD 'authoring' is designed with the assumption that were it actually to be speedy and efficient it would be put to evil, nefarious usage....

Everyone 'knows' the only reason a person would want a DVD burner is to lovingly record/copy all those overnight rentals...

It's really gotta be about the sheer volume of data to be managed/converted....then, when it comes to burning I have found that 'slower is good'....setting the spiffy new burner to do it 'to-the-max' makes sexy, shiny coasters - perfectly, every time. So 16x is a no go....me uses 4x...

Technology is like women....can't live with[out] 'em....can't shoot 'em...

cactoblasta

on Jul 24, 2006

Have you tried Toast? I've found it's slightly faster for the Mac than iDVD.

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