Battle of the Software NLEs, Part 2: Editing HDV

Event DV by Jan Ozer In August we kicked off a four-part series comparing five leading NLEs--Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro, Avid Xpress Pro, Pinnacle Liquid Edition, and Sony Vegas--based on key aspects of their performance in pro postproduction. Here we explore how they fare when editing what's arguably the hottest technology in videography today: HDV. In the first installment of our Battle of the Software NLEs series, we examined three key components of digital video editing: Overlay, Chromakey, and color correction, using MiniDV as our exclusive capture source. Here we move on to HDV, the much-ballyhooed HD format that delivers highly compressed digital video at MiniDV-or-better bitrates (25Mbps or 18Mbps) that mainstream PCs can handle. How well the systems handle them is another issue, as is how effectively the top software NLEs in the pro market have been adapted to work with HDV in much the same way they work with the more familiar DV format. Out HDV tests focused on several aspects of production. First, we tested capture and writing back to tape with all HDV-compatible editors, using a simple one-minute test project. Below, we report how each editor handled the capture and write-to-tape task, as well as associated rendering times. read more...