At work almost daily now, I've been converting analog video (TV commercials on VHS tapes) to digital format. This allows for quick distribution and review of TV commercials by clients and colleagues in other countries. We have been using a pretty crappy external video capture device called Video Blaster MovieMaker by Creative Labs (the Sound Blaster people). MovieMaker's slow USB 1.1 interface is probably partly to blame but the software bundle is horrible as well.

The most irritating thing about the MovieMaker video-capturing software is that after you click the Record button no less than 10 seconds pass before it actually starts recording video to disk! The user-interface is quite poor as well. Videos are saved in MPEG-1 format.

To edit the MPEG-1 files, Ulead's VideoStudio is included. It has probably the worst user-interface I've ever seen — if not for the tooltips, it'd be impossible to even get started without referring to the manual. For me just needing to cut out unwanted video from the start and ending of raw video clips, the most frustrating thing is that when you move the marker to a point in the video on the slider bar (to try and pinpoint the lead-in and lead-out points), there's huge delay before it shows you what frame you're at. Sometimes the delay can be 10 to 15 seconds long. There's also no button to step up or down a few frames at a time — you have to use the marker on the slider bar which is difficult to move precisely in small increments.

After the videos are edited, I use Discreet cleaner software to convert the MPEG-1 files to Windows Media Video (WMV) format which usually halves the file size while maintaining good quality. I like cleaner but it's slow.

So basically, I've been investigating a better solution. I sought advice from Eric Lin, our IT Manager in Taiwan who's very knowledgable about this kind of stuff, and he recommended TMPGEnc and PowerDirector Pro. I tried TMPGEnc's MPEG tools (File => MPEG Tools => Merge & Cut) and it worked superbly — simple and fast with the right controls! So now TMPGEnc will replace VideoStudio.

I didn't try PowerDirector Pro but I remembered reading about Microsoft's media tools. I dug around Microsoft's site and found Windows Media Encoder 7.1. Within a 5 minutes I had it installed and had quickly and easily converted an MPEG file to WMV format. Oh, I will need to figure out how I can batch process several files at a time but I'm sure that'll be easy. So now Windows Media Encoder will replace cleaner. By the way, I also came across Canopus ProCoder which is direct competitor to cleaner.

I'm pretty happy with my 2 newly-discovered software tools. I'm sure they'll improve my workflow and I can't wait to try them out at work. I certainly wouldn't mind a better video capture device (either an external FireWire device or a AGP- or PCI-based video card) and new Pentium 4-powered PC too though!

Quick links:

TMPGEnc - AVI to MPEG-1/2 converter and MPEG-1/2 editor (free for personal or non-commercial use)

Windows Media Encoder 7.1 - converts and encodes video into Windows Media formats (e.g. WMV, ASF) and more

Windows Media Encoder 9 is at Release Candidate stage.

CyberLink PowerDirector Pro - digital video editing ($95.95 download, $99.95 physical shipment)

Discreet cleaner - digital video encoding/conversion (cleaner 5 for Windows - $529.99, cleaner 6 for Mac - $599.99)

Canopus Procoder - digital video encoding/conversion ($699.00)