Hey everyone...

I installed S12 last night and have spent quite a few hours trying things out. I wanted to share my initial impressions...

 - S12 seems very stable although I get the impression it uses more RAM than S11 - at least on my XP machine.

- Installation went smoothly and quickly with a few bumps in the road:

            1. ProDAD Vitascene -  Showed up as a trial installation so I ran the update downloaded from the ProDAD website and it works fine now.

            2. Smartsound - Doesn't work in S12 although it was fine in S11 on the same computer. That's being covered in another thread.

 - S11 projects load just fine even though I have them on an external drive.

- My Alpha Transitions work now! They were broken in my S11 program and none of the fixes posted on the forum worked. I guess that problem was fixed in S12. Super!

- The volume handles problem appears to be fixed. I couldn't get them to mess up. That's great!

- I was hoping that the 'Auto Color Correction' effect would be improved but it still gives erratic results in scenes with movement or lighting changes.

- I ended up buying the BWPLUGINS which seem to work much better for lighting corrections than anything included within S12 Ultimate.

- Montages - Took a little while to figure out but it works well. The templates are defined in groups - an opening template, a segue/transition template and an ending template. HOWEVER, I found you can use any template anywhere and for my current project I used a segue template at the beginning and it was more suitable than the 'opening' montage template from that group.

- Magic Bullet Looks - At first I thought I wouldn't use this effect much but it really comes in handy for a couple of areas you might not have thought about:

       1. Old poor quality footage - I captured some old Hi-8 tapes and after applying lighting and color correction filters it was pretty nasty looking in some scenes with lots of video noise and pixelation. So I applied Looks to mask the imperfections and give it a stylish appearance. Makes the footage so much more watchable!

       2. Applying Looks to Montages - Greatly increases the variations available and provides a lot more depth, texture and color options to the default templates.

- Boris Grafitti - I spent a couple of hours trying to wade through the complicated interface to figure out how to create overlay titles. Even though I used Boris years ago, I gave up trying to wade through it. The thumbnail previews didn't work as specified. You have to tell Boris to generate the preview thumbnails but then when you come back into Boris the next time - the previews are not there. So you have to generate them again. Just not worth the hassle...

All in all I'm very jazzed about my new S12 installation.

Thanks for your comments,

After trawling through the posts I am still undecided if I buy s12 or not. There seems to be pro's and con's on both sides of the fence but {and i have posted this before} I think a lot of the problems associated with studio {all versions} are caused by the systems people use ie: I use s10 on my particular configuration and have never had any issues but reading various posts regarding s10 there seems to be people out there that have no end of problems. So i think i'll just stick with my plain 'ol S10 for awhile.........it does what i want it to do and the family & friends that watch the dvds that i make are always happy with them.

That's my 2 cents worth.

Iain. 

Thanks Jim - mine's still "in the mail" also. Can you provide a link to the ProDad upgrade you mentioned - I too use the Ultimate version.

Tony

Here's the link for the ProDad servicepack update. You can also find it in the Vitascene help menu.

http://www.prodad.de/gb/vitascene-service-pack.html

- Boris Grafitti -

You don't need to commit to the duration and background of a title you are making!

If you open a black title on the Studio title track and apply Boris to that, you can switch the background from the black video off, so that the Boris title aquires a transparent background. When you accept your work and go back to Studio, you can move this new title anywhere on the title track. You can also change the duration. It seems if you have used keyfamed moves, they will scale themselves to the new duration.

Better documentation is required - the manual just petters out before discussing many features such as 3d text, text paths on so on.

So don't give up too soon!

Interesting comments about your video card as well. That must be because of the DX10 compatibility. 

Here is a link to a video I did with Studio 12.  It uses one of the montages and some of the "Looks".  As a user of Iclone, I absolutely love the "Looks".  I used Heroglyph for the Titles, as I have been a long time user of Heroglyph and I don't have my head around Boris yet, but it does look interesting.

Studio 12

jshelton:

Here's the link for the ProDad servicepack update. You can also find it in the Vitascene help menu.

http://www.prodad.de/gb/vitascene-service-pack.html

 When you go to the cited ProDAD web page, it says the software update is for January 2008. Since Studio Ultimate V12 came out early June 2008, wouldn't it already have this update?

Not so much my first day as my first proper project - just a short one relating to a child's birthday party.  It's AVCHD from a Panasonic SD5, XP, Q9300 system with 2GB memory.

 The 'album' has three pages of clips in it.  I want some from page 2 and some from page 3.  There's the usual S11-style wait while the thumbnails appear.  I wish I didn't have to manually go from page to page to get this to happen - it would be handy if I could make some tea and come back to find all three pages populated.

I drag in the required clips from page 2, go to page 3, wait, select the first clip, shift-click the last one, and S12 crashes.

Repeat the procedure accepting the prompt to continue the crashed project, another crash at the same point.

Try again, this time starting the project from new.  Another crash at the same point, as soon as I select a clip on the last page.

This is getting tedious... I'll see what Studio 11 does.

 In Studio 11 I can actually select the required clips and insert them into the timeline at last.  The last two clips are shown black whereas they were shown grey in Studio 12, and hovering above the last one I see a message saying it's corrupted or cannot be read.  Well, that's better than simply crashing.  As the relevant files are very small and clearly not useful, I save and exit and delete the two clips manually.

 Now I open up the S11 project in S12 and it warns me it is converting the project to S12 format.  All clips are visible in the three pages of the album and no crash on accessing the third page.  Clearly there was something amiss with the data, but S12 seems less robust than S11 when confronted with whatever the problem was.

Now I delete the project and start again from scratch.  Once again there's the tedious business of watching the album populate with thumbnails and the "processing selection" message if I select more than one clip.  However, with about 30 minutes effort I now have 17 clips on the timeline, amounting to 10'30" of material.  Whew!

Hmm, something odd going on - the album is being repopulated with thumbnails again, which is a pretty CPU intensive task.  Why's that?

Now to start editing.

 First hurdle is that there is sound but no video in the playback window.  Groan...  Save and exit to see what that does.  Run S12 again, wait for the thumbnails to appear yet again.  Drag one into an empty timeline, and it plays with video.  Reopen the saved project, and good grief, the album is being repopulated.  Waiting... Eureka, I now have vision as well as sound.  Time for a break!  More later.

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Well, after that shaky start the rest has gone pretty well with no big dramas.  I've included a montage (Album) at the start and end, though I'm afraid that for a family audience my videos will end up looking rather similar if I use that theme again.  It took a bit of fiddling, and even some reading of the manual, to work out how to get the best from the montage theme, but when you carefully check out all the features, it's quite easy to get the effect that you want - but you can't vary the overall look and feel that much, which as I say, will limit frequency of use.

Working with montages using AVCHD material and background rendering turned on is quite viable.  How shall I put it - the time it takes to background-render the montage seems reasonable given the nice end result and the amount of processing that is clearly required.  However, a couple of times the background render stopped with the job incomplete.  I had to reopen the project (without closing or exiting) to force it to complete the background render.

Where the montage includes video, the corresponding audio comes in with a jolt unless you do your own fade on the audio track.

 One solution to the continual refilling of the album thumbnails is to switch to "icon" view when you're not actually using the album.

 Uh-uh - a serious bug emerges in the montage.  Basically, the method described in page 124 of the pdf manual for adding effects within drop zones does not work.  The clip that I need to be live video at the end of the "Album" montage needs colour correction.  I applied colour correction in accordance with the manual's instruction, but in the montage, after a couple of seconds the colour correction disappears and it reverts to the original colour.  I tested this again with a huge red skew - the redness is there for about two seconds, then the uncorrected video appears.  I'll retest this with other themes and report in the bugs thread more fully.  Not good!

UIh-uh - more problems.  I'm trying to burn to a AVCHD DVD and I get the error "Export error: real time - i:\pinnacle studio renders\render/david bday 67e302d0\dvd\studiosequence\temp" - tried twice, same error.  I hope after all the preceding traumas that I'm not going to end up with an unburnable project.

I've changed the render path to the root of drive I: on the assumption that it doesn't like the long path in the error message given - yup, that gets me further but then CRASH, down goes the program after writing 19 out of 15441 frames.  Briefly and "out of memory" error message appears.  Words are starting to fail me...

Well, I've had a coffee and taken my sense of humour by the scruff of its neck, and after re-opening the program I've now got past frame 1000 of the 15441.  I'm getting a render rate of typically 6fps but slower through the montage section, despite the background rendering being on during editing.  "Bmem" reports the remaining memory getting very low at times.  My 2GB would appear to be the minimum viable amount (must revisit the program requirement page).

It's now after midnight and the job's still not done... the render completed but the disk erase failed.  Burning from the render looks like it will work as it's now doing a full erase, but that takes some time - I may not get to see the ten minute 17 clip video till the morning, despite having started about 5.30pm.  I had imagined that an hour or so would crack it!

Final note - well, it did finish before bedtime and the end result looked good with no visible problems.   But Mrs Oz has suggested some editorial amendments - and I'm not sure I can face going back over it!

 Summary of problems encountered:-

S12 not as robust as S11 when dealing with defective clips, leading to repeated crashes.

Repeated slow refreshing of album thumbnails - thumbnails not saved it seems

Initial lack of video - sound only in preview

Bug in montage affecting ability to apply effects

Export error if file path is too long

Crash on first render - out of memory?

 Inability to automatically erase rewritable disk after render

Ozpeter:

 Summary of problems encountered:- S12 not as robust as S11 when dealing with defective clips, leading to repeated crashes. Repeated slow refreshing of album thumbnails - thumbnails not saved it seems.  Initial lack of video - sound only in preview. Bug in montage affecting ability to apply effects. Export error if file path is too long. Crash on first render - out of memory?   Inability to automatically erase rewritable disk after render.

My approach with Studio 12 has been to take a successful Studio 11 project and see if I can take it a step further--one step at a time. 

• The first experiment was to burn a 40-minute AVCHD project WITH a simple menu.  Voilá. 
• Step two was be to give that menu an animated overlay by exporting a video with an overlay and labels, a sort of "poor man's montage."   This provides an animated menu but with static "standard" buttons. Voilá.
• Step three will be to learn montages proper.  I will try this first with MPEG2 clips before experimenting with AVCHD.   Perhaps tonight.
• Step four will be that swashbuckling 2-hour Blu Ray epic to spell bind and rapture audiences everywhere.  To start Saturday, to finish .... oh, in a couple hours, of course .  My head start is the significant number of AVCHD M2TS disc image stream files I've saved in recent months in anticipation of an upgrade that accepts BD media. 

To drag multiple pages of AVCHD clips to the timeline in a single stroke may be customary, south of Capricorn, like quaffing those liter-sized Foster's "singles."  That dazes my system when loading too much SD MPEG2, so I load AVCHD a single swallow at a time, then wait until any uncouth burps are over before doing another.  My preview screen fails or the program hangs, occasionally, when I get too nimble and try to start new operations too fast.  Thus far, though, no outright export or burn fails.

My raw guess is that a montage based on AVCHD may need to be exported first into an HDV file or AVCHD image file, then imported into the timeline of a final project.   That's the workaround I'll try if I encounter the same problems as those Down Under.

Uh-uh - a serious bug emerges in the montage.  Basically, the method described in page 124 of the pdf manual for adding effects within drop zones does not work.  The clip that I need to be live video at the end of the "Album" montage needs colour correction.  I applied colour correction in accordance with the manual's instruction, but in the montage, after a couple of seconds the colour correction disappears and it reverts to the original colour.  I tested this again with a huge red skew - the redness is there for about two seconds, then the uncorrected video appears.  I'll retest this with other themes and report in the bugs thread more fully.  Not good!

Well, of course today the "bug" is gone, at least in a new test project.  But when I open yesterday's project without bothering to save the quick test project, S12 crashes.    It really does seem no more stable than the previous version.  It's a pity to have to approach it with a sense of dread, wondering what's going to go wrong next.

Now, when I try to redo the montage in last night's project to get rid of the no-colour-correction bug, I just run into further problems - still no effect and part of it won't background-render (though all the red bits have gone from the timeline) - just a big exclamation mark on the preview.  So it looks like the only way to get the project the way I'd like is to start from scratch with a new one, and hope that it doesn't get too beset by bugs and unexpected behaviour.  This one must be corrupted in some way.

Ozpeter,

Read your experiences with interest and although I'm not really ready to move up to S12 yet I thought it worthwhile commenting on one of the snags you encountered:-

 "First hurdle is that there is sound but no video in the playback window.  Groan...  "

This is not new as I have encountered this in S11+ (only Very Very occasionally). When it has occurred I found that the quickest solution for me, without quitting and restarting S11, was to click on the "Capture" tab. then, (after the error occurs telling me I have no capture device attached) click back on the "Edit" tab and video is restored along with the sound.

Thanks for that tip, Mick.  I've not encountered that problem since the first time - so far!

 I'm currently trying to get the "Album" theme montage to work in isolation.  I'm finding that you have to go over and over it, just getting each element to work as it should.  You don't necessarily get the frame you have selected for display, for instance.  Sometimes it background-renders with an exclamation mark after the turn of the second page in the theme.  I've not yet got to the point of trying to get the colour correction to work, as doing that first seemed to mess the earlier parts up.  The colour correction that I want to do involves a bit of keyframing, but I'm not going to those lengths until I can see that it's going to work with just a test colour change (loads of red to really show!)

Right now I've got it to the point where it's all working as it should without the colour correction.  So I've put the clip that I want corrected on the timeline and apply and background render the colour change.  I go to ending drop zone, right click, delete, then drag in the corrected version from the timeline.  I wait while the montage re-renders.  Well, it's done it, but the quality has gone down to some kind of low resolution.  Previously it's rendered in full AVCHD quality (or something that looks very much like it).  Once again I'll have to start from scratch.

 Sorry for the long postings but I think it's important for other users and hopefully the Pinnacle people to get a feel for what the user experience with this new product is in appropriate detail.

After hours and hours of work on this little project I've finally pinned down the montage bug -

 You can't follow a montage with a transition while retaining colour correction in the montage.  As soon as the transition is placed after the montage, eg a dissolve into the next clip, the montage does not re-render but the colour correction is instantly lost.  Undo the transition and the colour correction returns.

I have yet to test whether this applies to all effects and all transitions.

GRRR!!

I've also found that doing operations on the montage in an order not perhaps anticipated by the programmers causes problems with failure to render.   Whether or not I can set out some sort of collection of do's and don'ts remains to be seen, but I get the feeling the "usability testing" has been a bit skimped.

[Edit - the bug does seem to affect more than one type of video effect and more than (several) transition types - there's every reason to think that you cannot follow a montage which includes an item with a video effect, with a transition of any kind into the following clip, without the effect being lost.  You can add a video effect to the whole montage, then follow it with a transition, but that may not be what you want to do.]

Ozpeter,

Does this lead you to a two-pass approach?  Perhaps color-correcting your footage first (to an AVI file) and then using the corrected footage as the source for your "real project" that includes the transitions and montages and stuff like that?

This sounds like something Pinnacle should work on.

Perhaps color-correcting your footage first (to an AVI file) and then using the corrected footage as the source for your "real project"

IMO, of all the Video Effects, Colour Correction is the most GPU intensive. & could be Rendering from say 6  -> 13 fps, in Uncompressed RAW AVI ?