Crashing

Posting is currently light due to a side project editing HD video footage. After years of knocking out short videos on the Nokia I decided it was time to get fair dinkum and move to a prosumer editor.

The only trouble is that despite running on a powerful new box this software still crashes. Sure, video editing is about the most intensive exercise a PC can undertake but still, a phone editor is more stable!?

Question: when was the last time new software was released bug-free after thorough testing, or is this now the role of the mug consumer? Sure seems like it, especially after Microsofts Vista fiasco. Feel free to chastise me for not getting a Mac. I have no excuses. Back next week.

Comments

[crjc]

I still use old AVISynth with plugins for handling newer H2xx formats, and VirtualDub, and Audacity for sound. This involves converting to uncompressed AVI files (or HuffYUV which a lossless compression, also open source) while working on it, then compressing it to whatever formats I want.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_editing_software

[Peter Deane]

Adrian, I've been doing video editing for quite a few years now (mainly VHS-> DVD conversions, but other projects as well).

Don't worry about the crashing. Regardless of the software you still get crashes left right and centre mainly because (I think) there is simply so much data being processed. I mean with 2 hours of HD footage, you're working on files that can be 25-30 GIGabytes long. With so many bytes in, there's so much to go wrong.

One of the more reliable programs I use (which is free, incidentally) is Mpeg Streamclip - which you should download and try even if you don't regularly use it. It's quick for format conversion for instance, and handles a hell of a lot of formats.

Don't worry about a Mac unless you managet to acquire a self-righteous attitude. There is a stack more software for the PC than the Mac anyway!

[adrian]

crjc, I'm working with AVCHD files in .mts format and can edit them natively with this program. So far the rendering has been smooth, it's just the editing stability which bugs me.

But I believe Peter may be right that most editing software has it's hiccups. With 27Gigs of wedding footage to edit I'll just have to save the work every two minutes.

Thanks for the links/references, very handy.