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First Impressions of Nero 10

Discussions on third party software for the final creation of DVD including Nero, Roxio, DVD Architect, Magix, Ulead, etc...

First Impressions of Nero 10

Postby Ken Jarstad » Tue Apr 13, 2010 12:20 pm

With the advent of AVCHD high definition video on conventional DVDs I recently started the quest for a low cost, high definition authoring solution. Up to this point the only solutions were in software packages costing $500 usd and up. Vegas 9 and other editors will now produce suitable high definition MPEG-4 movies but until now there has not been a reliable, lower cost authoring solution. I recently received an upgrade offer from Nero for Nero version 10. I knew that Nero Vision 5, part of the Nero 8 package, would author AVCHD on conventional media but it seemed to have problems using the various MPEG-4 movies produced by Vegas 9. I am happy to say that Nero 10 does work and my first simple test movie looks marvelous!

Surprise - Nero 10 didn't give me an option to select what files were associated with it but a cursory check shows that none of my media file associations have changed. <shrug> I did de-select the option to have the Ask toolbar.

My first impressions of Nero 10 are pretty good. The manuals, as usual, don't give you much hand holding but the few things I tried seem to work. Nero Vision 5 has been bumped to Nero Vision "Xtra." Seems Nero is following the marketing lemmings and naming version 10 as version X. :roll: The icons on my Desktop and in my Start Menu say Nero Vision 10. There is now no need to buy a Blu-ray option since all high definition is supported standard. (Edit: not so for Roxio)

The editor in Nero Vision has been greatly enhanced. It reminds me of the editors in Corel DVD MovieFactory but it also supports keyframing! Pretty nice. It accepted the .m2ts file output from Vegas 9 with no problems and I used it to just whack the first 10 seconds off my test video where I had added the 'poor man's' DVD menu in Vegas 9.

The very first thing I did in Nero Vision Xtra was to configure the AVCHD codec. I went to More/ Recording Format and selected the AVCHD(TM) option. In 'Configure Encoder.....' I selected 'Highest' quality and in 'Encoding Mode:' I selected 'High Quality (2-Pass VBR)'. Clicking OK produces a window asking 'Do you want these settings to become the new default?' I clicked 'Yes' because I am not interested in producing a disk with anything less than the best possible visual quality.

I was able to get Nero Vision 10 to auto-detect chapter/scene changes and then I adjusted the chapter points where I really wanted them. This was a bit "fiddly" but worked OK. I deleted several others so my 18 minute test video had 6 markers. I was then able to stumble through adopting a canned DVD menu and I figured out how to change the default Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and so on to some meaningful names. The menu I used was named 'Movement' and showed three chapters on each chapter menu. Each of the menu thumbnails was in motion, playing that segment of video. Nice!

I placed a conventional DVD in my DVD burner and told Nero 10 to go to work. It began crunching away using all four cores but not 100 percent. While it crunched it notified what it was doing and displayed the video portion it was working on in the window. Within a minute it displayed "SmartRender" and the motion of the video display sped up very noticeably. Unfortunately, I didn't record the time needed to produce the finished disk but I was very pleased with the result.

My test video consists of three of the most challenging videos I have. The first is of a winter storm with falling snow. The snow in the far distance was very hard for many of the AVCHD codecs to reproduce without smearing. It was followed by a view from my porch at night with 6 inches of fallen snow. The contrast was very high and these codecs had trouble with that, too. The second portion was a hiking trip to Mount Rainier where I taped closeups of a tiny trickling stream with moss and tiny plants. Detail and motion - hard to replicate. The third segment was a wedding where the ceremony was in a darkened sanctuary. The HV20 (on Cine Mode- always) reproduced the dark tuxes in a darkened room beautifully and most of the codecs did OK. NV10 did very well. The last segment was the wedding reception which was held in a poorly lit room. I must say here that Vegas 9 did the best job of any of the editors in boosting the video brightness and saturation and the result from NV10 was gorgeous. I may have to send the couple a new disk!

Nero 10 was a 292 GB download :shock: so I'm glad I'm in town now with Comcast 12 Mb service. The deal included a 'free' copy of Media Home'. There are additional DVD menu templates, theme packs, image packs, clipart and a sample video. Good thing we have large hard drives these days!

Correction: 292 MB
-=Ken Jarstad=-
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Re: First Impressions of Nero 10

Postby John 'twosheds' McDonald » Tue Apr 13, 2010 2:14 pm

Thanks for an excellent review Ken. :-D
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Re: First Impressions of Nero 10

Postby hpharley90 » Tue Apr 13, 2010 4:42 pm

Me too Ken. Thanks for the review. :-D

Ken Jarstad wrote:Nero 10 was a 292 GB download

You gotta be kiddin me? :bounce:
Thanks
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Re: First Impressions of Nero 10

Postby Steve Grisetti » Tue Apr 13, 2010 4:47 pm

I agree, Richard. A 292 gig download would fill 60 DVDs!
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Re: First Impressions of Nero 10

Postby Ken Jarstad » Tue Apr 13, 2010 6:34 pm

When I first joined this forum I was on dial-up. They made 600 Kb/s DSL available about four months before we sold and moved into town (~40 dollars). Now we pay about 44 usd/month for 12 Mb/s service from Comcast. Expensive :-s but at times like these I sure do appreciate it.

Nero, as many of you know, is a huge package with many, many features. I was looking specifically for a certain functionality and so that is all I have tried so far and that is all I have reviewed. I will share as I find out more.

I did try the movie player function. I finished my first disk last night and wanted to test it but my lovely wife was watching "Dancing with the Stars". Two hours....... no way that was going to happen until later. :- Nero 8 had Nero Showtime as a media player but this package has something called Nero MediaHub. Like so many of the media apps today it wants to scan your HDD and catalog everything. MediaHub wanted to 'do its thing' and I waited patiently for it to finish. It only took a couple of minutes on my system and presented some very nice looking thumbnails arranged in 3D perspective so you can actually tell what some of the items behind the top one look like. I don't know how to say this but I was not put off by the Nero 10 implementation of this catalog function like I was with Elements 8 and the Corel products. Can't tell you why but I found it unobtrusive.
Edit: Looking further I notice, once again, this app wants to create an entry and thumbnail for every render file on my disks! I wish I could exclude them somehow. This is a nuisance.

Oh yes, the MediaHub player did a splendid job of playing back the AVCHD disk until I could look at it on the "big" 32 inch living room set. As soon as I selected the DVD drive it brought up the disk menu.
-=Ken Jarstad=-
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Re: First Impressions of Nero 10

Postby RJ Johnston » Tue Apr 13, 2010 8:35 pm

One new feature I wasn't expecting was multiple video and audio tracks. You can keep adding tracks, up to a limit, I'm sure.

I tried some transitions, but they didn't come out too well. I started with an AVCHD clip, split it in half, trimmed, and added a rotate transition. After burning a AVCHD on DVD, I played it back, and the smart encoded parts were perfect, but the transition part looked low-resolution.
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Re: First Impressions of Nero 10

Postby Ken Jarstad » Wed Apr 14, 2010 1:28 am

I have been using Nero 10 StartSmart to invoke the various tools. I have noticed that closing a tool and attempting to open the same one again doesn't work. I have to open another tool, shut it down and then I can open the desired tool again. It's a minor bug which I reported on the Nero forum. Does anyone else (Robert) have the same problem?

One other thing I forgot to report - in my test video I had one closeup of my hiking buddy talking and the audio was a little late. It followed noticeably behind the mouth movements. It did not do that in the original Vegas source video.
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Re: First Impressions of Nero 10

Postby RJ Johnston » Wed Apr 14, 2010 11:08 am

Ken Jarstad wrote:I have been using Nero 10 StartSmart to invoke the various tools. I have noticed that closing a tool and attempting to open the same one again doesn't work. I have to open another tool, shut it down and then I can open the desired tool again. It's a minor bug which I reported on the Nero forum. Does anyone else (Robert) have the same problem?

One other thing I forgot to report - in my test video I had one closeup of my hiking buddy talking and the audio was a little late. It followed noticeably behind the mouth movements. It did not do that in the original Vegas source video.


No problems here opening a tool after closing it while using StartSmart. I'm on Windows XP.

You could try uninstalling and then run the CleanUp utility that you can download from Nero. Then install again. I had to do that because the first installation wasn't correct.
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