My experience with NLE video editing software has never been good. I bought one package (hardware to convert RCA jack inputs to digital and NLE software) about 2002 or so, and it worked a few times -- and would never work again, no matter how many times I uninstalled and reinstalled it.
For the last several years, I have been using Ulead VideoStudio 9 with the ADS Xpress DX2 box to do the composite to digital conversion. It has worked pretty well, but every once in a great while, VideoStudio would cease to do the capture, and I would have to reinstall it.
This time, I reinstalled it -- and it did no good, so I went to Corel (which bought Ulead) and saw that they had a brand new package, Corel VideoStudio Pro X5, which you could download and try for 30 days. The price was quite reasonable, but of course, a product that will not run is of no real value. I mean once or twice I managed to capture video, then it became cranky, and kept saying, "Cannot start capture graph" when I tried to capture video. There is nothing in the online help or user's guide explaining what this means, or how to fix it.
My guess is that there is something that gets scrambled in Ulead VideoStudio 9's registry that forces me to reinstall it every year or two -- but why it no longer lets me reinstall it and work has me mystified. I understand the logic behind Microsoft's registry scheme for recording data specific to different applications -- but to be blunt, it replaced multiple clumsy and scattered schemes in each application's data files with a single opaque method for storing the data. I'm not persuaded that it made Windows more reliable.
Back when NT first came out I think everyone thought the Registry was a great idea; harsh experience, my favorite example being Microsoft people putting non-repeatable (say, after a restore) 8.3 file names in it, shows that it's just too easily abused. Since it's not so much opaque per se but so big and grossly complicated as to be opaque in the needle in a haystack sense ... well, all in all I've switched to Linux.
ReplyDeleteBut you have a number of things to do where I'm sure F/OSS solutions are poor or non-existent that you're stuck in Windows hell....
You could try a third movie editor such as Sony Vegas Movie Studio (the consumer version, not the professional). If it still doesn't work, then there must be a driver problem or perhaps the problem is with the capture hardware.
ReplyDeleteMy understanding is capture hardware can be rather finicky to get working, especially on the cheaper end of the spectrum. And that's not even including copyright protection such as Macrovision.