Video editors and 3rd party codec support

[prototype7]

I've been trying to decide on a video editor, and have used the trials for Corel VS 12 Pro and Adobe PE7. Wanted to try Pinnacle as well but they don't have a trial download available.

I have 720p video from an in-car camera which is encoded in H.264 in a QT MOV. I can't even play the video raw on my machine - it plays very choppy and skips several seconds at a time. I figured it was just poor performance of the Quicktime player on Windows, as all MOVs I've played perform very poorly regardless of size. So I wanted to try conversion to an MPEG or AVI, which started me looking at editing software, which I need for basic clipping/splicing anyways.

I tried Corel first and when I went to export the video, I noticed it had recognized the XVID codec I have installed on the machine, so I could export to MPEG4. Only a couple of the available encodings were even able to output 1280x720, and only MPEG4 plays smoothly.

When I tried PE7, the options for output formats were much more limited, and it did not provide any option for using the XVID codec like Corel did. The only encoding that could do 1280x720 was some MPEG2 codec, and it played back just as bad as the raw H.264 MOV. I figured this might just be a limitation of the trial version. Does anyone here use a 3rd party codec for export from PE7?

[Paul LS]

You can use the Xvid codec (if installed on your machine)... you need to go to File>Export>Movie. Then in Settings select the export format as Microsoft AVI (not Microsoft DV AVI). Then in the Video settings select the export codec you require.

PE7 has QT and H.264 export options under the "Share" tab. Not sure if they are enabed in the trial version.

The 1280x720 MPEG2 video should play fairly smoothly on a reasonable perfomance computer... what are your computer specs?

[prototype7]

You can use the Xvid codec (if installed on your machine)... you need to go to File>Export>Movie. Then in Settings select the export format as Microsoft AVI (not Microsoft DV AVI). Then in the Video settings select the export codec you require.

PE7 has QT and H.264 export options under the "Share" tab. Not sure if they are enabed in the trial version.

The 1280x720 MPEG2 video should play fairly smoothly on a reasonable perfomance computer... what are your computer specs?

Ahh, found the XVID codec option and have started rendering. Thanks for the instructions! Seems like they would have offered the various formats and codec options in the normal "Share" section rather than putting it separately in a menu.

I'm on a Pentium M 1.8GHz laptop w/ 1GB RAM. Yeah I know, not much horsepower here. For whatever reason, the MPEG2 video plays back terribly on this machine, while an MPEG4 AVI using the XVID codec is perfectly smooth, barely taxing the CPU. I'm using Windows Media Player for playback and I recently did an update to the latest version and bundled codecs.

Basically my goal is smooth playback on the laptop at full resolution with minimal loss. I will eventually render some video for upload to vimeo, but first I want full quality for my own reference at the track.

[prototype7]

Well the MPEG4 AVI rendered from PE7 was screwed up somehow. It kept skipping frames and freezing, and after maybe 20 seconds, went checkerboard-pattern and crashed WMP. Tried skipping ahead and it still crashes after a short time. Audio is fine and video was generally synched to it, but the video was sketching out the whole time.

I don't have enough of a background with this stuff or the time to troubleshoot this problem. I think I'm going with Corel, it had no problem rendering to MPEG4 without tweaking anything and the video played back perfectly. I'm not very impressed with my limited experience with PE7.

I wish Pinnacle had a trial download, I've heard good things about it but I won't buy it without a test drive.

[Paul LS]

Certainly Corel handles a wider range of formats better than PE7. It is a good stable program but does not have the depth of PE7. I use both... dependant on what I am working with and what I want to achieve.

Whatever program you go with make sure to visit Muvipix.

[Bob]

I'm not particularly thrilled with xvid and don't use it. I prefer divx which I've found to be far more stable. The standard divx codec is free. http://www.divx.com/divx/windows/codec/ I just use the codec and not the player or converter.

[prototype7]

I'm not particularly thrilled with xvid and don't use it. I prefer divx which I've found to be far more stable. The standard divx codec is free. http://www.divx.com/divx/windows/codec/ I just use the codec and not the player or converter.

I downloaded the Divx codec and tried rendering the video in PE7 again, and the results were even worse. Not sure how to describe what's happening with the picture (lots of distortion to say the least) but now the video is way out of sync with the audio as well. I really don't understand what's happening with the rendering in PE7. I haven't changed any of the default codec settings since successfully rendering with XVID in Corel. Also makes me wonder if the sketchy performance I was getting with MPEG2 playback may be a result of using PE7 to render it, or rather whatever is going on with PE7 during rendering.

I have no doubt this software works well for others but it clearly isn't working correctly in my environment.

[RJ Johnston]

Exporting to DivX is futile from Premiere Elements. You can't even play the resulting file in the DivX player. And that's with DivX 6.8. And you really want MP3 for audio, but Premiere Elements doesn't offer that for an audio option. It should be very easy to export. Works like it should in Magix MEP 14 Plus.

[Bob]

Exporting to DivX works for me. Nary a problem. I'm using Premiere Elements 3.02 and I have DivX 6.8 installed. Probably one of those hardware/driver/software and system resource mix issues you see cropping up all the time. I generally take care of the audio compression in VirtualDub.

[RJ Johnston]

Thanks Bob. After reading your response I kept at it and finally exported a beautiful video using the DivX 6.8.5 codec. The Divx player would still not accept it, but after using VirutalDub doing a direct stream copy on the video and audio conversion to MP3, the DivX player didn't complain.