Summary of what I have learned, plus a LOT of links, is Here

Note March 2004
This is now the journal of my OLD video editing computer, but should be read FIRST since I made a lot of notes about using Premiere with the Dv500 card, and my early work making a DVD to play at a TV

While I am certainly never going to compete with any of the great film directors, the idea of doing my own home video has interested me ever since I bought an 8mm camcorder and, now that the price has come down to where I can "squeeze" a bit to buy a computer with the "horsepower" to edit video, I decided it was time to take the plunge

I first did a lot of reading at Videoguys to figure out the best video capture card that would do what I wanted and still be at least "somewhat" afordable - so, after reading all the reviews - I decided on the DV500 since it will capture both Analog (my several year old 8mm camcorder) and Digital (in case I ever decide to upgrade to a newer Digital camcorder) and then, after reading in the online newsgroup about all the problems people were having adding a video capture card (any and all brands and models) to an existing computer, I found the "Turnkey" page at VideoGuys and decided to order a ready-made computer at AlienWare

I selected their Roswell model since I did not want to get into the dual processor model (too much money) and only "splurged" on getting the maximum 512 Meg of memory and a larger 2nd hard drive for the capture files then, while waiting for my computer to arrive, I looked around and found support forums for the editing software Adobe Premiere and the DV500 Capture Card

My first project, actually two projects in one, will be to learn about the Windows 2000 Professional operating system that comes on the new computer (my old computer, which goes to my wife to replace her even older model, has Windows 98) so when I am ready to actually do video editing I [hopefully] won't have problems due to not knowing anything about Win2kPro - Grin - I'm sure I'll make plenty of other mistakes!

Once I know my way around Win2kPro, I will begin by following the tutorials in the capture and editing manuals to capture, edit and write a few "small" video clips, including merging several small clips into one complete project video - which I think will take me 2-3 months (remember, this is a hobby, and a part time one at that) after which I will be ready to tackle a "big" project of culling the good/interesting shots out of several years of home video to create a [2 hour?] film of Terrie's and my first 10 years together

While waiting for my computer, I read and ask questions
The first thing I learn is that the "latest" MPEG video format is not supported at the price level of the capture card I picked (effective MPEG capture takes a special chip on the capture card, so they are "usually" in the $1,000 or more range) so I will be working with the AVI video format. Since MPEG is primarily used to write a movie DVD or VCD and I plan to write back to my VCR after editing (which this card is designed to do with AVI files) I don't think I will miss the MPEG format... and... if I decide later that I need MPEG, there is software I can buy to convert AVI to the MPEG format (which will take longer than a capture card with hardware support, but I can't afford one of the $1k or more cards so am just going to concentrate on the files I can create)

I also bought a book at Amazon to start learning Premiere, with an option of Another Book if needed to have another "slant" on using the software

Roswell computer arrived Jan 17 2002
Intel D815EEA2/D815EPEA2 motherboard
AGP slot for geforce2 video
PCI 1 for my SCSI-II card
PCI 2 for soundblaster 5.1
PCI 3 for dv500 capture card
PCI 4 empty (1)
PCI 5 for usrobotics modem

(1) the dv500 has a piggy-back card so the slot next door is basically not able to be used without crowding which, I have read in the support forum, is not good due to possible over-heating

First job was to reconfigure old (well, less than a year old) computer for wife, then I could start installing my software (MS Office, etc) on Roswell. Had to make a trip to the store to buy a set of RCA-connector cables, since the GO Video deck I use does not have an S-Video connector.

My software installed, it was time to do Video!
First thing I discovered was that going into the DV500 control program and setting it to use the COMPOSITE mode (my VCR does not have an S-Video connector) did not tell the capture module in Premiere to use that setting, so I had to then tell Premiere what settings to use, and save those settings as "Default" so I could load my system configuration each time I started Premiere

First capture went well, with about 7 minutes or so of 720x480 video (full screen mode to later write back to tape) with 48k 16-bit stereo sound also captured, resulting in an average data rate of 3.61 mb/sec and 0 dropped frames (video files are HUGE, that 7 minute file was about 1.5 Gigs... I can already see that it was a good idea to upgrade the standard 40G capture drive to 100G when I ordered the Roswell)

When I played the video back, there was no sound. A quick visit to the support forum and I found that the Pinnacle codec's video sound is played back to the BreakOutBox (BoB) so to hear the video on my computer's speakers I had to make another quick trip to the store and buy Y adapters and a cable to go from the BoB to the Line In on my sound card

Next project on Jan20 is to capture several small clips and...

• Learn how to edit the clip to keep only the "good" stuff
• Then learn how to add titles at the beginning of the "good" clip
• Then finally learn how to merge the title and good stuff and write a new, final, clip

This style of work will, I hope, allow me to (eventually) archive my clip scenes to DVD and then simply copy them back to the computer when I want to write another VHS tape... so my individual scenes will be "camera ready" and not require any further processing at the time of writing another tape

Premiere is VERY "greedy" of computer resources... which I found out when I converted a small test segment from the Pinnacle AVI format to Microsoft AVI (so it could be played with MediaPlayer) and then minimized Premiere and went to MediaPlayer to actually play the test... at which time Premiere would not come back and I had to restart... moral of that is to always CLOSE Premiere before doing anything else (Well, I found that if I don't minimize Premiere I am able to press the usual Alt-Tab to taskswitch)

Making progress on a very SIMPLE editing process... (please NOTE that this is on the second day of learning, so what I do now may change later, when I figure out some of the more advanced features available in Premiere)

• Use the default "Bin" and import one of my captured clips
• Double-Click on the clip to open the big view/edit window
• Use the play/stop/single buttons to find my chosen start
• Click the IN icon to set my starting point
• Repeat play/stop/single and then set my OUT ending point
• Click File-Export-Movie and select the In-Out option
• Using the Pinnacle AVI codec means the file does not need to be rendered, only a read and write action on each frame, so the operation is relatively fast
• Selecting some other codec, such as Microsoft AVI so the clip may be played on another computer, means the clip will need to be rendered (converted) and is VERY slow... this is the reason people buy dual-cpu computers, or P4's with "gobs" of memory, but at my budget level, if I ever need to render a complete project, I'll just start the process and then view the finished product the next morning (Note - as a test, I rendered a 1.5 minute "full size" clip into a 320x240 MS codec AVI clip, which took just over 1/2 hour)

• Click File-New-Title which opens a windows with the "safe areas" already defined so the title will view on a TV screen
• Enter Text, save the title, right click on the resulting file name to set the Duration, and the title is ready to use
• Drop the Title on the Timeline, with an AVI right behind, and it's ready to export the entire timeline to a new file (remember, I said in the beginning that I was doing very simple editing)

Along the way I had to brighten one scene (Window - Show Video Effects - Pinnacle - Brightness and then drop the Brightness "control" on the video clip in the timeline) which worked well to turn a too dark to see scene into one that could be viewed (may need to adjust the operation "level" as the default 25 didn't do much, 75 made the picture "grainy" looking, so for this particular clip I settled on a 50 setting)

Finally, the last test of the day was writing to tape

• Take my finished Part01 clip and drop it on the timeline
• Click once to select it (dotted border) and press Enter
• Enter a name when asked for a Project
• Wait while a "preview" is created
• Set VCR to Line 2 and record
• Success!

Jan-23, A Shrinking Drive Mystery - Solved!!!
As I was capturing and editing, I watched file sizes very closely, and noticed that the Windows Explorer drive properties function was telling me that I had just over 9 Gig less space than was accounted for by the total of all the video files

To make a long story short (a favorite phrase of my wife) I discovered that the RECYCLE BIN defaults to TEN PERCENT of available space on each drive... and that it pre-allocates and LOCKS that space so it can't be used by actual data files

I changed this default behavior by

• Setting the option in Windows Explorer to view System Files
• Right Clicking on the drive's RECYCLED listing
• Selecting the PROPERTIES option
• Selecting the GLOBAL tab on the pop-up window
• Moving the selector bar from 10 percent to 01 percent
• My capture drive now allocates a reasonable amount

Total of the 8 parts is 90 minutes, which took 3 hours for Premiere to build the files needed to play the movie back out to tape (this is where a dual-cpu or even a single-cpu motherboard with faster cpu and memory would help, but I did not have the budget for such, so just go do something else while the program is rendering)

The first time I attempted to play the finished product to tape, the playback stopped when the Windows screen saver started, so I learned that to play a long project I need to disable the screen saver, and just turn off the monitor once the video stream is on the way to the tape deck

Came back later, playback finished, took tape to VCR at TV... it works!

My 90 minute project takes almost 12 Gigs of drive space, and the "movie" files Premiere creates to be able to play to tape take another 12+ Gigs, so I can already see that the 100 Gig capture drive I had put in the Roswell computer is not going to be big enough to keep very many projects online... so my next purchase (someday, budget has to recover) will be a DVD writer for 4.7 Gig per disc file storage

The way software manual writers can confuse and hide things never ceases to amaze! The default time for a title added to a video is 5 seconds, hardly time enough for a viewer to focus on the screen, let alone read even a short printed message... especially if I, the project director, forget to change the default

After some digging, it turns out that Editing the Preference for General and STILL images also changes the default for the Title function... where when I changed the default 150 frames duration of a still image (30 frames per second times 5 seconds = 150 frames) it "cross references" to the time duration of a title

I changed the still image default to 600 frames, and my title default duration is now 20 seconds. I still need to remember to change the default to a longer duration for a LONG scrolling title, but at least a single screen of text will not go by so fast it can't be read by the viewer

When your computer is working perfectly...

... it is, of course, time to "fix" it until it doesn't !!!

Having already mentioned that I would, someday, decide to get a DVD writer, I decided in June 2002 that the time had come

While my Pioneer A04 was on back order I did more reading at the Dv500 support forum, and decided that I needed to upgrade from the v2.01 driver to the v4.01 driver for "best" MPEG output (the v3 driver was an interim download that I skipped)

After reading about all the upgrade problems others have had (the v4 installer does not completely remove all prior information) I followed the "recommended" procedure of uninstalling v2 and manually deleting the remaining files and directories... what a MESS!

Either I did something wrong, or the v2 uninstaller was faulty, so I wound up having to completely wipe my C: drive and start fresh... which, while I was doing so, gave me the chance to further change my system by installing a drive swap system so I could simply swap different C: drives with completely different sofware... my main drive for day to day work with Email and anti-virus running in the background, and a video editing drive with no "resident" software to get in the way of the video editing process

I bought the drive swap system from provantage.com, a StarTech SNT127ABK base unit and an extra 127ACADDYBK drive enclosure for the 2nd C: drive (plus, of course, a 2nd 20gig hard drive for the actuall install and swap)

After about 2 hours work (had to move the capture drive as well as the boot drive, due to the shortness of the ata100 ribbon cable) I was back up and running with two different configurations... and just about a minute to shut down the computer, swap drives, and power back up with the configuration of the hour loaded and running

Preliminary testing (gee... this having to sleep sure cuts into my "play" time) shows that the v4.01 driver DOES read Avi's created with the v2.01 driver (that was a concern posted on the forum) for creating mpeg files... but actually testing those files with a DVD-R will have to wait until my A04 arrives some time in July

Two days later
I have now determined that the v4 drivers are MUCH faster for playback to tape, since they totally skipped the 3 hour renderning of the v2 drivers and simply played the timeline out to my Vcr... the play time of 90 minutes did not, of course, change... a 90 minute movie is still a 90 minute movie!

Since I did not create Mpeg files (actually, an Mp2 video file and a linked Wav sound file) before, I really don't know if the v4 drivers are faster... my 90 minute video took about 142 minutes to export... more information is in the VIDEO.XLS file on my web site, link at the bottom of this page

I have the Impression manual (grin... reading software manuals is SO much fun) and plan to start working with the Mp2/Wav files created from Premiere to create "whatever" Impression needs to put all the files together, with a menu, and then eventually "burn" it all to a DVD-R

Well... Impression has (to me) one major lack... it does not create a menu... it requires menu creation to be done in Photoshop (or other program that will create a graphic image in PSD format) and it then works to link the "chapter buttons" in the PSD file to the actual chapters (in my case, each file will be a chapter) so I think I will wait to do any pre-mastering work until the Pioneer A04 arrives, and will take a look at the Sonic MyDvd software bundle... since I've read an online review that indicates that MyDvd does everything needed inside that one program

MyDvd is MUCH easier to use, so I will continue to do my capture and edit with Premiere... then create Mpeg output from Premiere and the Pinnacle version 4 drivers... and finally feed the Mpeg files (Mp2 video and Wav sound) to MyDvd to create the menu structure and "burn" the Dvd-R

Some process and file size notes in a spreadsheet VIDEO.XLS