Video CD Maker: The Cheap, Easy, and Competent Video Editing Suite

        by Rob Rice           May 2004

 

 

A few weeks ago I bought a digital 8 camcorder with the intention of transferring my movies onto video tape and mailing the tapes to friends and family. After spending what seemed like an eternity of filming and transferring the video over to video tape, I finally got my first cinematic epic in the mail and out of my life. Well, it didn’t take long for people to start calling and telling me that my tapes did not work. Finally, after much thought and realizing that they were not a bunch of cry babies I realized that the tapes must have been damaged in the mail. At that point I decided that there must be a better way. The answer was to put the video on CD which would then be playable on a computer or DVD player.

 

The software that came with the camcorder allowed one to transfer the video via USB cable or FireWire (a.k.a., IEEE 1394) to a computer. You can then burn that video onto a CD. This is good because I do not have a DVD burner but only a CD burner. Unfortunately, the software was clunky and the USB cable that came with the camera could not transfer the data fast enough to produce a non-stuttering video. Having read that FireWire was the preferred method of video geeks, I bought a FireWire cable (fortunately both my camera and PC are FireWire capable) and picked up the least expensive video editing suite I could find, having already spent a bundle on a camera, video tapes, and now a FireWire cable. What I found on the shelf was Video CD Maker, by Topics Entertainment, a digital video editing suite for $19.99.

 

Installation was a no-brainer. But when I opened the application my first impression was, “Ah-ha, now I know why it costs only $19.99”. A single skinny menu labeled DV Plus opens up in two columns. The column on the left has several icons while the column on the right has some still images with labels. Well, I thought, there is not much to this. After finally realizing that I had the application minimized – I maximized it and discovered a bunch of additional features, such as File, Mail, Sort, Edit, Import and Export. This is the main menu screen and consists of the Menu, which I just described; the Application Bar which has buttons for DVR, MPEG Encoder, MPEG Editor, Video Security, and VCD Maker; the Multimedia Data Window which displays MPEG, AVI, BMP, and JPEG images; the Photo Edit Window where you can edit picture files such BMP and JPEG; and finally the Album Bar where you can manage and edit existing albums.

 

Advertised features include the following:

·        Easy to use interface

·        Video viewing

·        Video editing

·        Video conversion

·        Video burning

·        Video security surveillance – motion or timer based

·        100s of special effects

·        Fast video transfer (200-100,000 KB per second)

·        Video CD, Super Video CD, and DVD output

·        Supports multiple encoding jobs simultaneously

 

Now I realize that some people who read this article are already mentally blanking out because of the plethora of acronyms. So, let me get that out of the way.

 

There are several movie formats that this program can encode your movies into. These are AVI, MPEG 1 and 2, VCD and Super VCD. If you want to send a movie via e-mail then encode your movie with MPEG 1 or 2 or AVI. As to which depends upon the recipients capabilities to read it, but usually one will work.

 

Photos use such encoding as BMP and JPEG, but if you plan on burning your movie to a CD, which can be played back on a DVD player or in a computer, then you would want to encode the movie into VCD or SVCD. SVCD produces a video that is twice as sharp as VCD.

 

One important note, a compatible DVD player will be able to play CD-R media or CD-RW media. It is interesting that many of the new cheap DVD players now hitting the U.S. markets are more flexible than their more expensive counterparts. This is because the cheap DVD players use PC components. However, several DVD players which do not advertise as being SVCD capable can actually play them without any problems. So, try it and see.

 

Using Video CD Maker is a point and click learning experience. There are only the most basic explanations in the software’s help section. However, the interface is well laid out and fairly intuitive.

 

Using my new FireWire cable I downloaded my video and encoded it into VCD format. The software then burned it to a CD without any problems. The result was about 40 minutes of video on a single CD recorded in VCD mode. The audio and video quality was acceptable while playing it on my DVD player and without any stutters; however a flattened distortion could be easily seen throughout the video, giving an appearance often seen in overly compressed JPEG pictures.

 

A second attempt, this time downloading the video in MPEG 2 format showed a marked improvement but when I tried to burn it to a CD using SVCD it would not accept it and threw an error message back at me. So, is it operator error or buggy software? Since I have not had much time to use the product I am going to hold off on answering that question until next time in part 2 of this article. But what we can say is that Video CD Maker does a good job of producing VCD CDs; now let’s see if it can go the distance.

 

Topics Entertainment: http://www.topics-ent.com/

Honest Technology: http://www.honestech.com/

CompUSA: http://www.compusa.com/

 

Rob Rice is a member of the Oklahoma City PC User’s Group and a computer specialist in Anchorage, Alaska.