[jdibb]

I used studio 8 to quickly edit out commercials and create an MPEG from a "friends" episode the other day. It was fast, and the results seemed perfect to quick inspection.


Should I be expecting to run into trouble in the long term with this tool? I only ask because it seems many of you go through many steps to make DVDs from RTV material, but this was very simple and inexpensive.


Comments?

 

[DaJoos]

Did you run any RTV tool prior to the edit/burn? (Like RVTConvert?). I'm curious to hear as I just got Pinnacle Studio 8 (for non-Replay reasons) and would like to also use it for Replay. People keep talking up Womble and Movie Factory, and I'd prefer to use what I've already purchased! TIA.

 

[jdibb]

Quote:

Did you run any RTV tool prior to the edit/burn? (Like RVTConvert?). I'm curious to hear as I just got Pinnacle Studio 8 (for non-Replay reasons) and would like to also use it for Replay. People keep talking up Womble and Movie Factory, and I'd prefer to use what I've already purchased! TIA.

Nope. I uploaded with DVA, grabbed the mpeg from the local guide, opened it up, chopped it up and output it as an mpeg2. I didn't burn a DVD, just popped the mpeg on a CD for computer viewing.

 

[Bargonaut]

I thought Studio always re-encodes the output. Are you saying that it simply wrote out the new MPEG without the commercials, or did it actually recompress a new stream?


People use tools like Womble and RTVToolkit to avoid compression time.


-BS

 

[jdibb]

Well, I chose a different output than the input. "VHS" quality mpeg 2, so I expected it to go through a "rendering" phase, as studio calls it.


I guess if I knew for sure what the input data was, I could try outputting in the same format and see if it re-renders. When I get time to do this, I'll try to remember to followup with the answer.

Quote:

People use tools like Womble and RTVToolkit to avoid compression time.

That's the type of info I was looking for, thanks.

 

[TheDreamer]

I think Studio doesn't always re-encode the output. At first I was using it to cut commercials...and it was resulting in bad MPEGs (Nero would transcode the file, and crash while doing it).


Later I decided to try having it change bitrates and such to make it really re-encode the file (mainly because I had recorded in standard, and I needed to resize the frames for Nero) This seemed to work better with Nero...but it was also taking forever to process 45 minutes of video....on a 3.2GHz P-4 w/HT....


Around this time I had a trial version of Womble...which is even slower than Studio 8 at applying the same transformations.... But, I happened to try leaving it as 352x480...and Nero handled it fine from Womble. So, that's what I do now. Gonna probably buy Womble before the coupon expires. Though first on the list is to activate my latest ReplayTV.


The Dreamer

 

[RalphWonderLama]

Studio 8 had a big problem with audio sync until they released their latest patch.

It drove me nuts.


Cheers.

 

[rrapoport]

I am, it looks like, utterly alone in this, but I had horrible, horrible problems with PS8 and ended up deciding it wasn't worth the price (and it was free to me!).


My main problems were:

A) EVERYTHING took forever. Granted, I'm on an Athlon XP 1700 so I didn't expect encoding to be speedy, but the actual program manipulation was painful -- scrolling down to another set of scenes was a "click on the scrollbar and get a cup of coffee" event. When talking to the PS8 people, they said that the number of scenes you were supposed to work on was about 100 -- It was taking my show MPGs and breaking them into *thousands*.

B) Burning DVDs did. Not. Work. It would try to burn the DVD, go a bunch of the way and then die. Result: Coaster.


I eventually found Womble MPEG Editor and ON MY 500MHZ LAPTOP (sorry for shouting) found it a pleasure to use. Sure, encoding is relatively slow (on the laptop), but that's unattended time -- actual setup is so speedy that these days if I'm sending someone a DVD of a show I take the extra 90 seconds to remove commercials. Oh, and UMF2 burns DVDs w/o a problem (as does Nero when I use DVD Shrink, but that's not with ReplayTV files)


-roy

 

[Frayser]

Just wondering -- can the edited MPEG2 file created by Studio 8 can be used for streaming back to Replay via DVA?

 

[TheDreamer]

Quote:

Originally posted by RalphWonderLama Studio 8 had a big problem with audio sync until they released their latest patch. It drove me nuts. Cheers.

What's the latest version, and how do I tell if I have it?


I just tried firing up my Studio 8 and checking for updates...and it tells me there's a Studio 9 now and they want more money from me to get it.


So annoying because I just upgraded to Studio 8 a couple of months ago for a chunk of money (because I own a Dazzle product, the way I used to get shows into my computer before ReplayTV). I was using the MovieStar that came with my Dazzle device to edit ReplayTV shows, and I was hoping Studio 8 would work better (I was having audio sync problems....actually last time I burned a DVD from Studio 8...I was still having sync problems...)


But, it wasn't a problem if I converted the show to MPEG1 (VCD)....which is what gave me the impression that it wasn't reencoding ReplayTV MPEG2s to DVDs....


The Dreamer.

 

[RalphWonderLama]

Check on the Help-> About or look at the splash screen.


Latest version is 8.10.4

http://www.pinnaclesys.com/docsuppor...08&page_id=450


The support groups were screaming for a patch to the sync issue. The 8.8.17 fixed some, but if I remember correctly, did not fix the big problem.

 

[Luchak]

I have read almost all of the DVD articles and I must still be missing something.


I took an hour long show recorded in medium quality and had DVArchive pick it up. I ran the file through rtvconvert without error. I fired up Studio 8, put the "rtvconverted" file in without problem. I go to create disc and 7 hours later I have a rendered DVD image.


How are you guys using Studio 8 doing it without having to "render"?


Also, how are you guys getting so many hours of shows on a single DVD? I can't get more than hour.


Thanks for any insight you may provide.

 

[jdibb]

Personally, I didn't. Mine did render, but it took a lot less than 7 hours for 25 min. I didn't do it to dvd quality only "vhs" quality. I have a p4 3.06Ghz, 512 MB.

 

[RalphWonderLama]

I have an different way to fix the problem. I don't use Studio 8.


Cheers.

 

[Luchak]

Took another look around Pinnacle Studio and couldn't figure out what you mean by "VHS quality". Did you create a DVD from the image? If so, how? If not, what did you do with the image created?

 

[jdibb]

Under the "Make Movie" option, I chose MPEG and then chose VHS quality under presets. I just dumped the file to CD to give to someone to watch on their PC.

 

[RalphWonderLama]

Here are general rules in video conversion:


1) You can't get more resolution than you started with(*).

2) It is easy to translate higher resolution to a lower resolution.

3) Your standard non-HD TV is at VHS resolution (or just slightly better).

4) Lower resolution makes more space; so you can record more.

5) Render time of lower resolutions take less time.


(*) Note: You can possibly clean up and get slightly higher resolution picture by doing extensive and highly complex matrix transformations. This is generally only possible if you work for an organization that has a three letter name... CIA, NSA, FBI, IBM, CNN... It is an art and not a science. If it is not an art, then I would love to have someone point me in a documented direction...


A general rule of thumb for DVD rendering is:

1) If the input video rate is the same as the output then no rendering SHOULD be required.

2) Rendering is required if you don't edit the stream at a correct point.

3) If you add anything to the video; it must be rendered.

4) Smart Render features in/of software will try to only render what is needed and splice it in.


Hopefully you see the general idea and other people will be able to chip in.


Cheers.