Editing with Ulead & Pinnacle
Unlike JVC’s PD1, the FX1E doesn’t come with any software to help edit the MPEG recordings it makes. That has to come from a third party – and the selection, at least for users of Windows, seemed to grow almost daily during our testing and the writing of this review, though much that we’ve looked at has seemed like work in progress, whether beta or not.But, Mac users are even less fortunate and, although Apple’s Final Cut Express HD and iMovie HD are due any day, that’s meant we’ve had no chance to give a hands-on report of HDV on a Mac.
What was available while we were writing the review – though not in our hands - was Lumière HD plug-in for Final Cut Pro. The latest 1.5b9 beta version has just added support for the FX1E, but can’t output back to tape.
The first company to declare direct support was Ulead, with its Windows program Media Studio Pro 7. A plug-in enabling MPEG-2 capture is available for £180, but is sold as a package with MSP7 for just £250. Read more here
Although Ulead’s offering distinguishes itself by having batch-capture capabilities, we found that results were far from frame-accurate (or even seconds-accurate!). Also, it wasn’t able to record HDV back to tape – showing that these are, indeed, still early days.
Ulead was one of the first to provide direct-capture support for the HDR-FX1E using a plug-in,but performance of the plug-in and the MSP editing software was nothing to write home about
The on-screen preview was also too jerky to be usable. However, the program was able successfully to capture HDV to disk – which might seem like nothing to shout about, but can’t yet be assumed as it usually can even with the cheapest of DV editing programs.
When editing HDV, though, the reasonably capable real-time performance that MSP 7 shows with DV vanished, and a render was necessary even just for previewing unchanged video files on the timeline.
Although Pinnacle claims that its latest prosumer Windows editor, Liquid Edition 6, has HDV support out of the box - and this was one of the features used to market the software at launch - we found that it lacked device support for the FX1E, though this capability is now promised with a free updater to V6.1. And, without device support, LE 6.0 couldn’t record HDV back to tape either. ..
Footage shot on an FX1 at the VideoForum HDV Q&A being checked through on LE 6.0The 6.1 beta was running on our stand at VideoForum 2005 along with every Windows HDV solution then available.
But we were too busy to check it out there, and the dual-Xeon PC that had been put together for us by one of the UK’s best-respected editing-system builders, DVC, had to be returned after the show.
So, what we’re saying here is based on our pre-show tests. However, our next big review will be of LE 6 itself, and though this is largely finished, we’re holding it over for a day or so, hoping to be able to include our findings with 6.1 beta, which should be with us soon.
What we could do when using LE 6.0, though, was edit MPEG-2 files we’d captured using MSP 7 and its plug-in, and also the lower-res (1280x720) HDV clips that Pinnacle provides on CD with its software.
Like MSP 7, LE 6 wasn’t capable of real-time editing – even on our powerful dual-processor workstation - but it was more responsive than MSP. We also tried using a single-processor machine – well, you do, don’t you – an Athlon 64 3200+, with 2GByte RAM.
This could play the Pinnacle-supplied clips on the timeline without dropping frames – even with some 3D effects applied - though only if the timeline settings had been manually optimised for HDV. However, the higher res footage from the Sony (at 1920x1080) played back on the Athlon at eight frames per second or less, but audio was fluid enough – though, again, only after tweaking the timeline settings.
There is another downside to working with HDV on software-only solutions, and we saw it with the Ulead and Pinnacle programs. These don’t allow you to check the edit full-screen using a TV set or broadcast monitor connected to a digital camcorder or digital VCR fed by FireWire from the editing package.
Being able to do this is important when preparing projects that destined to be watched on TV, since what you see on a computer monitor is considerably different to what the final viewer will see on a TV set. And this is something else we’ve become accustomed to with DV editing and sorely missed.
