I've had a look and for slide shows it is probably OK but seriously lacking video editing capabilities beyond the basics. The reason your camera club is doing the tutorials is for those users who are probably using mirrorless cameras and getting more serious with the video side of things. I'm guessing because I haven't set foot inside a camera club since 2011 but I assume things progress. It was still all about printing back then.
I started with photography and have had reasonable success with gigs but video is another whole new ball game. Not only in technique and the demands for shooting but the demands on the hardware are much greater when post editing. I hardly even notice Photoshop working on stills, its' instantaneous. Compression codecs for still raw images are much simpler and less demanding.
A video editor is not really the correct tool for stills. It will work if the system is powerful enough but its capabilities are wasted unless you want to get really adventurous. It will also be bloatware if all you are doing is slideshows with it and taking up more disc space than a simpler slide editing program.
Whatever you decide I wish you luck and a trouble free editing experience.
Ray.
Greetings Ray,
Actually it was a computer club, not a camera club. I, too, have not been to my old photography club for a couple years. They were into mainly competitions, showing individual prints or images. Too boring for me. I like to make audiovisuals, with music, text, animations, that include images and video clips. I use Photoshop for some corrections for my stills. But I think you might have missed some of the features in PTE AV Studio. You can edit video (trim the beginning and endings) and you can edit out sections that you don't want. I recently discovered this method even though I've used it for years. The ease that the PTE program has for stills and videos to create audiovisuals (or slideshows...) is really the best one I've found, and I've tried dozens. MS2022 might be OK if you are only dealing with video clips. But in this age of taking pictures, it does not work to well for me when you want to combine stills with videos (not to mention it keeps crashing...). I've created tons of audiovisuals and put on my Facebook page. But take a look at this site. He is a user of PTE and makes lots of how-to-do videos for photography and PTE. If you are into photography, maybe you'll give PTE AV Studio another look.😀
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSRlEl6raTzjc6ju4VvucJA/videos
Here is a PTE show I made. If you saw the recent Bond movie, No Time To Die, the beginning was filmed in Matera, Italy. It was a real crazy chase scene. Here is a video I made of when we were in Matera...much more peaceful, but just as spectacular and fascinating. Just for fun...
Gary
Hi Garry.
Like I said, the program is great for what you have used it for and I respect anyone's decision as to what works for them but from a video editing perspective it is very limited.
Also the program crashes on your system. For a lot of people who help out here it doesn't.
This is one of my my video styles for comparison. I know it will not be to everyone's liking.
Ray.
Greetings Ray,
Very nice. I'm not quite that inventive. I like the PTE AV Studio program because it seems to be much easier to 'assemble' a show than using a video editing program. I'd think a video editing program is great for just that, trim, edit a clip. Then to put it into a show, like you have done, I don't have the skill to do it in a video editing program. When I make my shows, it is more of a story telling project of a trip or event, using stills and video clips. But I must say that PTE does have the ability to trim, edit, speed up/slow down, etc., videos. These features are not hidden, but you might need a little guide to find them and use them. One of the beauties of PTE is the ability to animate stills, videos and text (rotate, pan, zoom, etc.). I haven't seen a way to do that easily in video editors.
The PTE program is used for international contest. I've see extremely complex shows that I have no idea how they did them...kinda like what you've done. The main thing I need for a video editor is to just be able to cut out sections of video files. I've recently discovered how to do that in PTE so I don't really have to go out of the program for that. I was hoping MS2022 would do that easily but the crashing of the program just will not work for me.
What's funny is I discovered I have Vegas Movie Studio 9 and Movie Studio 15.0 but never really used them. I forgot I had them. Well, it will give me something to play with...
So I opened the same file in MS15 and had no problems with it! I did an Export Movie and it came out just fine. Quick and no problems. But one question. My original video clip has a bit rate of 30Mb/s. MS15's export (just choosing MP4) changed it to 12.5 Mb/s. I want to export it at, say, 8 Mb/s but I don't see a setting for bitrate as I could in MS2022 to choose the bitrate for Export.
Any ideas?
Thanks...Gary
Hi-Gary.
Strictly speaking I can't say much as that is a question for the Vegas forum and not here but 'Save to Disk' should give you more options than is good for you in as much as if you get the settings wrong, you will crash MS15 on exporting as well or produce a file with 0 bits.
Ray.
@Gary-Oddi Hi, most formats have a Customize Template option, change the Bit Rate in there to 8,000, (I think it'll be similar in MS)
This gives a file of Overall bit rate of roughly 8mbs, yours on the left, the Vegas export on the right
But like @CubeAce says that's a Vegas question, you'll get plenty of replies on there
https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/vegas-pro-forum/
Greetings, These different but similar names for the programs get really confusing...Vegas, Movie Studio, Magix...
Hard to tell where to go, which forum. The program name says 'Movie Studio', not 'Vegas...' But thanks for the link. In the little testing of Movie Studio 15, it has been working very well. Just selecting 'Mp4' for 'Make Movie', it gives a bitrate of about 12Mbps. It has Templates to choose from and I now see the 'Magix AVC/AAC MP4' to choose. But, it does not seem to have the ability to then to be able to have a Custom setting to tweak it down to 8Mbps. But thanks for the link to where I should address these issues. Making progress,
Thanks, Gary
Hi Gary.
That is because until recently Vegas developed Movie Studio up to version 17 and then stopped all development of the program.
Magix stepped in and replaced it with Movie Studio 18 which was a re-badged version of Movie Edit Pro that has no coding from the previous versions and has now been merged as one product and rebranded as Movie Studio. Yes confusing but I think they are differentiating their product lines so there is less crossover of capabilities between the product lines.
Do be aware that reducing bit-rates on exports reduces the quality of the output, reducing the detail. Colour, contrast and sharpness will all suffer. Ideally to retain quality, because any export is re-encoded and therefore re-compressed, the bit rate should be set higher than the original files used. If you are uploading to YouTube, the video will be re-encoded again with another subsequent loss of quality.
Ray.
@CubeAce Yeah agreed, i was going to ask @Gary-Oddi why choosing 8mbs? the only time i do that is reduce the file size to post videos on Boris's forum because for some reason they have a quite small limit for upload, but for YT, FB & on here i keep the bitrate as high as the orig, & like i wrote above, the reduction in frame rate from 59.94 to 29.97 seemed to make the playback less smooth in all the exports i did. If it's a hardrive space issue? i've come to the acceptance that all inactive media is stored on a separate drive, only the files i'm using are stored on my 'editing' drive, & only Windows & programs are my (C) drive.
Greetings,
Yea, I see it better now. Even though it says 'Movie Studio 15.0' in the upper left hand corner of the program, the Help has 'Vegas Community' for help. But the upgrade shows 'Movie Studio 2022 Platinum, which is not 'Vegas', but 'Magix'. I think they could have made it less complicated...😁
My choice of reducing the bitrate stems from many years ago when the size of files did matter much more. By reducing the bitrate, you could decrease the size of the final project significantly. And, when using my PTE AV Studio, you could not tell the difference in a final project between a 30Mbps and an 8 Mbps bitrate. And uploading to sites and transferring the final project was faster, too. Maybe it is the way Publishing (or exporting) the final project in PTE produces the excellent final results. Never have anything but a sharp/smooth video. And I can easily reduce the bitrate further when I am exporting the final project in PTE.
I've got 4 physical (3.75 TB total) hard drives and space is still something to be careful of. But I still contend that you can not do in video editors what you can do in PTE AV Studio with more ease, if you want to do any animation. I've looked into MS15 for animation and it is just not as easy to do. But...MS15, I'll keep to do some trimming and editing when needed. Works well.
Thanks... Gary