For those playing along at home... Been using Ulead VideoStudio 12 for many years now, and the last few months for the HD H.264 direct editing as you may know. I needed to use Handbrake also for final output conversion. So I decided to give the trial version of Pinnacle Studio HD 14 a go.
Just did a blog with it, and with no help or references had my latest blog done very quickly and smoothly within an hour on my first try, I really like it, quite intuitive. H.264 1280x720 HD playback is instant, and editing is generally pretty smooth, better than Ulead. Still a bit jerky on the clip trim bars, but I often don't have to use them thanks to the audio waveform display below the video, so I can see when I start speaking and move the bar directly to it instead of start/spot listening I have to do with Ulead. It outputs just fine directly in 1280x768 30fps MPEG4 for Youtube. So no more having the two step process of outputting in MEG2 and then converting to MPEG4 with handbrake. Final HD rendering seemed quite slow at 4Mpbs, and it wouldn't let me do high bandwidth stuff in the background like play a youtube video properly, but it's faster than the previous two step MPEG2-MP4 process. But for some reason it's "Best Quality" direct upload Youtube setting is only 640x360, so that feature is useless, so I'll juts output to MP4 HD and upload to Youtube manually. The iPod feature is useless too, it won't output in my desired 480x272, nor will it allow me to customise the video data rate. So I'll still have to use Handbrake for this. The MP3 audio output option is very nice, but it seems to have a bug in that I select 64kbps and it always gives me 192kps. So if you are looking to do direct H.264 MPEG4 video editing (like directly from a Sanyo Xacti or similar) then I'd recommend you give Pinnacle Studio 14 a try. Looks like I'll be buying this one and making the switch. Dave.
