My experience with video editing isn't exactly comprehensive. The body of work I've completed to date consists of a few small movies, a few short clips edited and extracted from DVDs, and my magnum opus: an hour long summary DVD of the first year of my son's life. Still, I know more than enough to be dangerous, and I can't help but wonder why low-end software is so much more powerful than high-end software in certain respects. The point of this essay is to highlight what I've found in the hopes that (1) others having the same troubles may benefit and/or (2) others who have something to contribute might tell me where I'm going wrong.
Perhaps my first mistake was in buying a copy of Pinnacle Studio Plus. I had done a fair bit of research as to what I software a novice should buy, and it seemed to me like I couldn't go wrong with Pinnacle. The video software market seemed organized into two categories, professional and amateur, and the price difference was tremendous. Whereas I would have spent over a thousand dollars on Adobe Premiere, Avid, or other high-end solutions, I spent a mere $69 at Best Buy on Pinnacle Studio Plus v10.5. Not bad, right?
The main problem I ran into rather quickly was that Pinnacle was limited, often refused to render movies for burning to a DVD, had a very flaky and easily corrupted menu system, wouldn't burn DVDs of movies (assuming I could get it to render), and crashed with depressing frequency. In short, I grew disappointed rather quickly with the shortcomings of the software, which cost me hours upon hours of wasted time waiting for transitions to render, rendering and re-rendering completed movies, wasting lots of DVD blanks, and so forth. At the same time, though, I did develop some understanding of important concepts like codecs, transitions, titles, time code, various types of cuts, effects, and so forth.
The straw that really broke the camel's back, so to speak, was when I jumped through a ridiculous number of hoops to upgrade to version eleven of the Pinnacle suite. I posted the details about that on my blog, so I won't repeat them here. Suffice it to say that the update didn't want to install on Vista without a previous version already in place, and the previous version didn't want to install on Vista at all. After jumping through all those hoops and running into many of the same problems with the newer version, I decided it was probably time for me to buy something better.
I felt like I had come as far as I could with the product I had purchased. I thought for sure that the far-more-expensive, prosumer or professional packages wouldn't suffer from such issues. Sure, they would be harder to use—power and flexibility usually come with a price tag in complexity—but I expected they would install properly, make it easier to work with multiple file formats, be less prone to crashing, and so forth. Those are reasonable expectations for serious, "professional" products, after all. Right?
So I revisited my previous research on the higher-end packages. I took a good look at several products, but I settled on Adobe Premiere Pro for various reasons. I've been a long-time fan and user of Adobe Photoshop, and I've been using the Macromedia web-development tools (viz., Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash) since their first versions. I had been planning to upgrade my web development tools anyway, and my last version of Photoshop was a couple of years out of date, so when I discovered that I was eligible for an upgrade to the Adobe Master Collection CS3 for roughly $1,400, that sealed the deal. I figured I would spend about $800 upgrading Photoshop and my web tools anyway, so getting Adobe's complete, professional video editing suite for another $600 seemed like a really good price.
Unfortunately, I ran immediately into installation troubles after buying the suite. To be more specific, the installer would give me an "internal error 2739" error message and then shut down without any further comment. I contacted Adobe Technical Support, but they didn't feel like helping me because I was using the demo until my newly purchased software licenses arrived. I went Googling around the web for an answer and, sure enough, I found a site describing the issue I was seeing. Apparently, there is some kind of issue on Windows Vista with the way JavaScript installs and/or has its permissions configured. The work-around, for any who are interested, is to take the following steps:
Thankfully, that procedure got me past the issue, and I was able to install the suite successfully. For the record, I installed everything except Adobe Version Cue, which is essentially a version control system for Adobe products/documents. I don't work with a team, and I use Subversion for version control, so I figured I didn't need it. Foreshadowing: sign of quality film and literature everywhere.
I fired up Premiere and started poking around. Sure enough, my expectations were met; i.e., there was nothing as intuitive with Premiere as with Pinnacle. Pinnacle makes it dirt-simple to drag and drop video clips onto its timeline, trim them, add transitions, create menus, add audio, and so forth. To be fair, Premiere isn't that much harder to use, once you understand a few things, but it's certainly not as intuitive as Pinnacle. Still, I wasn't too worried; I'm a bright guy, and I was confident I could figure it out.
My first challenge came when the Adobe updater notified me that there were patches available for my software. I told it to do its thing, and it downloaded a hundred megabytes or so of updates before it started applying them. The problem was that neither the update for Adobe Premiere Pro nor the update for Adobe Encore DVD would install successfully. The updates would download just fine, and the installer would run, but then it would pop up and complain that the update didn't go to completion. No matter how many times I told it to do its thing—and I should point out that the updater rather stupidly kept downloading the same file over and over and over—those two updates wouldn't install.
I had been running my copy of Vista for a few hours at that point, so I decided maybe it was time to refresh the ol' environment variables. Unfortunately, a reboot didn't fix the problem. After the reboot I ran into the very same issue with the updates; they would download but not install. I tried manually downloading the updates and applying them directly, cleaning up the hard drive a bit, running the updater as an administrator, and even running under the administrator account itself. Nothing I did allowed those two updaters to go to completion.
Eventually I stumbled upon the "solution" by accident. I was trying to solve a different problem (about which I'll say more in a moment) when I found that the installer would succeed if I booted Vista without any of the typical startup programs. Anyone who has problems installing the updates should try the following:
I don't know which process or processes were preventing the updater from going to completion, but that fixed the problem for me.
My second disappointment came when I tried to import video clips into Premiere. My pastor had contacted me with a simple request: could I extract a short clip from the movie A Beautiful Mind for him, freeze the video at a certain point, and then fade the audio/video out a few seconds later? I had done this sort of thing for him several times before with Pinnacle, so I didn't expect any issues. In fact, I looked forward to doing the same thing with Premiere; I figured it would be a great learning experience.
I took the same preparatory steps I had followed with Pinnacle. That is, I used DVD Decrypter to rip the DVD to my hard drive and then used Auto Gordian Knot to encode the resulting VOB files as AVI files using the Xvid codec. For those who haven't done this sort of thing before, I can recommend this handy tutorial on the subject. It's surprisingly simple these days to rip a DVD and convert it to a usable format. Just follow the tutorial steps; you'll be watching movies from your hard drive in a few hours.
Then I ran into the brick wall that is Adobe Premiere's file compatibility. All I had to do in Pinnacle was drag and drop the resulting AVI file to the timeline and edit the resulting clips. That was simple. When I tried to import the resulting AVI file into Premiere it gave me an "unsupported audio rate in file" error message. Still, I wasn't too worried. I had seen this kind of thing before in Pinnacle when I tried to import Quick Time movie clips captured by my old digital camera (an Epson PhotoPC 3000Z for those who care to know), and the solution was always to use VirtualDub to convert audio and/or video to some other format.
After trying nearly half a dozen different video/audio combinations—all of which would import nicely into Pinnacle I should add—I got frustrated and went Googling. It seems I'm not the only one to run into this problem. Apparently, Premiere is super-fussy about what it will accept. In fact, it won't accept any of the more common formats used these days to pass video around (e.g., Xvid, DivX, FLV, H.264, etc.). What Premiere really wants is uncompressed video and audio!
For those who don't understand why that's such a big deal, allow me to say something about file sizes. When I ripped and converted the entire movie the resulting AVI file was about 1.4 GB in size, which isn't surprising given that I used the two-CD option in AutoGK. When I used VirtualDub to zero in on the roughly two minutes of footage I needed and convert it to uncompressed data, however, the resulting AVI file was 3.36 GB in size. Yes, you read that right: the two minutes I needed uncompressed was more than twice the size of the entire, two-hour, compressed film! Data of that magnitude gets ridiculous to work with rather quickly.
I realize Premiere is a professional product, and I realize that means its target audience is going to include many people who are working with uncompressed video/audio for maximum quality. But surely even professionals need to work with compressed video/audio from time to time?! I also realize it's not easy to do proper audio/video synchronization when working with compressed data like that, but Pinnacle manages to do so just fine; why can't Premiere, which is ostensibly a far more powerful package, do at least as well?
I was even more disappointed, however, when I found that some of the metadata displayed and used by Adobe Bridge was incorrect. To be more precise, the date shot was not the date that the clips in question were shot, but rather they were the date they were captured. This is important to me because one of my projects is to produce one DVD for each year of my son's life, highlighting his major accomplishments and generally trying to summarize that year with video, pictures, and audio. The year-one video I developed in Pinnacle was easy to work with, insofar as the clips can be sorted by date and display their date shot in the selection window and with tool tips above the cursor.
In contrast, Premiere wasn't showing me the right dates at all, and was essentially not providing me any good way to determine when any clip was shot! That's a real deal-breaker for me, as I don't want to catalogue each individual clip manually at time of capture. I'm just too fallible, and that's precisely the sort of thing technology is supposed to do for me. So I initiated another support request with Adobe. I literally went back and forth with them for months about this issue. Their original position was that what I wanted was impossible; they denied that the date shot information was available from the camera.
When I proved that wasn't the case, by showing them screen shots from freeware, third-party utilities and Pinnacle, they next took the position that the date shot cannot be stored in the resulting AVI files, so again what I wanted was impossible. When I proved that wasn't the case, by pointing them at the relevant specifications for the DV AVI file format, they next took the position that the date shot data is available in the camera and can be stored in the resulting files, but that it isn't available to Premiere because of the particular Microsoft video-subsystem methods they were using in the capture process. When I proved that wasn't the case, by showing them the results from a freeware, third-party utility that uses the very same Microsoft video-subsystem methods as Premiere, then they (grudgingly?) admitted that what I wanted was not an impossibility. They even said that such a feature may be considered for a future release of Premiere.
In other words, after arguing with them for months, systematically refuting every false claim they made, the best I could get out of Adobe support is that Premiere, which is ostensibly a professional package, cannot do what far-cheaper video editing software—or freeware utilities for that matter!—can do. They may consider adding such a feature in the future?! Gee, don't strain yourselves there on my account, fellas.
For those who find themselves with a similar need, I do have some workarounds to suggest. First, and surely simplest, is to download a copy of Paul Glagla's DVdate utility. It's quirky, and a bit buggy, but it makes it reasonably simple to rename all of the video clips you capture with Premiere, the point being to include the actual date shot right in the file name so they will be sorted by date shot by default. You can even tweak the format string used if you don't like the default.
Second, and more difficult, is what I have chosen to do. I use DVdate to rename my clips with a particular format that includes the date shot in the filename, after which I use a utility that I wrote to read the resulting filenames and generate Javascript code that can be run in Bridge via the Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit 2. It's a bit more work, but the result is that all my video clips have the current date shot in their metadata, which I find makes browsing in Bridge more pleasant.
I think most folks will prefer the simpler approach, but I will make my tools and the resulting Javascript available to anyone who asks. Just email me for the details. If there is sufficient interest, I may make the code available as well at a future date. It's in pretty rough shape right now; i.e., it works, but it isn't pretty (grin).
The same little project that drove me nuts with the import formats taught me something else I didn't want to know about the Adobe video-editing suite. Remember how I said I was working on an unrelated problem when I learned how to get the updater to work? Well, the problem I was dealing with at the time was that Adobe Encore DVD was crashing on startup every time I launched it. It was an especially crazy little project because I only had a couple of days to get it done, and after I finally got my data imported and the clip ready to go, I was about ready to tear my hair out when I tried to render it for DVD and couldn't get into Encore!
Again, Pinnacle makes this much simpler. In Pinnacle, you capture your video on one tab. Once it's captured, you can make your movie on the next tab, using transitions, titles, effects, audio clips, etc. Once you're happy, you simply go to the next tab and render it to file or DVD. With the Adobe suite the workflow is different. You capture your data in Premiere, and you can do basic editing stuff in Premiere, but anything really fancy requires you to set up an Adobe After Effects project and render it separately. When you're done with your editing, you then have to set up an Adobe Encore DVD project if you want to burn to DVD. The latest version of Premiere makes this a bit easier, thanks to a new feature to export straight to Encore, but it's still more complicated than in Pinnacle.
At any rate, every time I started Encore, the splash screen would appear, it would start initializing the media layer, and then this inscrutable message about loading CompilerVfw.prm would appear just before the software crashed back to the desktop. I had no clue what that meant, so I went Googling—how did we power users ever survive without the Internet?!—and found a post in the MovieCodec forums. That post didn't solve my problem, but it did point me in the right direction; i.e., it made me think that maybe the codecs installed on my system were the problem, even though I didn't have any of the codecs mentioned as "bad" in the post.
So here was my problem: how do I determine which codecs are installed on my system? Better yet, how could I selectively disable them until I found the culprit(s) (if any)? The only way I knew to list my codecs was to look at my sound and audio devices. But that wasn't going to tell me anything about which codec was the problem, and it certainly wasn't going to help me debug the problem. Thankfully, I found another free utility, InstalledCodec from NirSoft, which did exactly what I needed; it gave me the ability to enable/disable codecs selectively.
Once I found that utility, I disabled all codecs as a test and, sure enough, Encore could then load without crashing. A simple, binary search method (i.e., enabling/disabling half the codecs in question at a time) let me narrow it down to the culprit: the Voxware Compression Toolkit audio driver v1.6.0.17 was my problem. The filename is vct3216.acm in the Windows\System32 folder, and the driver key, for those who want to locate it in the registry, is msacm.voxacm160. I don't know why Premiere doesn't play nice with it, but enabling that one codec guarantees that Encore will crash at startup every single time.
For the record, I have the Vista Codec Package (version 4.5.2 beta 1) installed on this machine. That codec pack includes many of the codecs listed as bad in the MovieCodec post. I don't know what to conclude about which codecs really are "bad", or whether the Adobe suite is just particularly fragile in this regard. What is clear is that your mileage may vary, so when in doubt I suggest using the utility as I did to nail down the culprit(s) definitively.
Remember how I mentioned Adobe Version Cue earlier? Before I got onto the codec trail, which eventually solved my Encore problems, I read a few posts here and there from users who said that Encore wouldn't start unless Adobe Version Cue was installed and enabled. So what I didn't mention previously was the two days I spent uninstalling and reinstalling the entire suite.
I think the Adobe Master Collection is a fantastic value, even at full price, but I also think it has the least competent installer I have ever seen. When I read that I might need Adobe Version Cue after all, I figured it shouldn't be any big deal to add it. I fired up Vista's Programs and Features control panel applet, selected the Add or Remove Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection option, and used the resulting prompts to tell the installer to add Version Cue to my setup. It ran for four hours, eventually reporting that it had failed to install Version Cue and had failed to reinstall everything else as well. I tried once more (letting it run overnight) and got the same result, so it wasn't a fluke.
At that point, I figured an uninstall followed by a complete reinstall was probably in order, but I wanted to do a little research first about the rather dire warning the uninstaller gives you about activation. Said warning suggests that failure to deactivate before uninstalling means you'll never be able to use your software again. It seems that my copy is under a volume license plan that has no such restrictions, though, or at least there is no option for me to deactivate my software. Take that for whatever it seems like it's worth, but be sure to check before you uninstall. I imagine Adobe will probably make it right if I've screwed myself, but it's one more hassle I don't need.
Once I was reasonably confident I wouldn't be screwing my license, I told the uninstaller to remove everything. It ran for a couple of hours and reported that it had uninstalled a few applications but that it couldn't uninstall the others. I restarted (at its suggestion) and again told the uninstaller to remove everything. Again it ran for a couple of hours and reported that it had uninstalled some more applications but that it couldn't uninstall the others. I had to go through this process no less than four times to remove the entire suite safely from my machine. It literally took me an entire day of uninstalling to remove the suite. I have other computers I could use while it was working, but for typical individuals and/or businesses that's simply unacceptable.
I should also note that once I got the whole thing uninstalled and reinstalled I didn't run into my update problems again. All the updates downloaded and installed correctly the first time. It didn't solve the original crashing problem I was trying to fix, but it may well have solved other installation problems of which I was unaware. I'm inclined to think my original installation was screwed up somehow. Whatever the case, though, I recommend installing everything and then never touching it again. I could have wiped the whole damned hard drive, reinstalled my OS, and reinstalled the software as well in the time it took me to run the uninstaller the first time.
So, do I regret buying the Adobe Master Collection? Am I saying that I should have stuck with Pinnacle after all? Despite all that I have been through in these last months, I think the answers are still negative. I can do things far more quickly in Premiere than I can in Pinnacle, now that I know my way around it. The rendering difference is also significant, insofar as I've had Premiere render in five minutes what Pinnacle inexplicably takes hours to handle. And, of course, I can do a ton of stuff in Premiere that Pinnacle simply cannot do. Premiere really is a professional level tool; I can't imagine ever outgrowing its feature set.
What nags at me is the degree to which Premiere falls short in several blatantly obvious respects. Why is it that Pinnacle can get the date shot right and Premiere can't? Why is it that Pinnacle's interface makes it so easy to blend all the elements of movie-making, whereas any DVD production with Adobe is going to require at least three different packages and projects? Why doesn't Premiere at least support uncompressing compressed video/audio during import, rather than giving misleading error messages and forcing users to jump through painful hoops? Why do spurious codecs cause Adobe applications to crash altogether when far cheaper products cope just fine?
I expected to walk into a world of confusion when I upgraded my software; that's just part and parcel of learning a new set of tools. I also realize that comparing Pinnacle to Premiere is like comparing a scooter to a Porsche 911, but is it really so unreasonable to expect the Porsche to drive on the back roads too? Or at least not explode when you hang a pair of fuzzy dice from the mirror? Sure, it might get dirty, and it might be a bumpy ride, but I would at least expect the car to work. I guess I'm just irritated that my $69 piece of software can do things that my professional tools cannot. Perhaps Pinnacle was a bad idea insofar as it gave me unreasonable expectations for simplicity.
Whatever the case I can say this much with confidence: I'm not the only one who has problems with the Adobe suite. It's a great set of tools, but caveat emptor still applies.
10/22/2007