What's the point in taking VGA video if you can't work with it?
Published by Steve Litchfield at 21:24 UTC, August 28th 2006
Steve rants about Nokia's bundled video editing system of choice for the Nokia N93. Why include it if it's not up to the job and will only cause frustration for the majority of the owners of their flagship multimedia smartphone? Read on...
An integral part of the otherwise impressive Nokia N93 package (reviewed here and here on AAS) is Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. The idea is that you take your nice VGA resolution MP4 videos, edit them together and burn them onto DVD. It all seems so quick and simple in the N93 advert, but I wanted to set the record straight and spur Nokia into finding an easier way for us to do something with our shiny video captures.
Installing Premiere Elements is easy enough, though you do have to go online to the Adobe web site to get a special serial number. 15 minutes of setup later and installation was done, and I was feeling pretty relaxed. Now, at this point I should mention a few PC specs: my desktop is a pretty average modern PC, nothing flashy but not too far behind the times either - 512MB of RAM, Windows XP SP2, 2.2GHz processor. So I reckon I'm fairly typical of the average N93 user who wants to start doing something with their new toy.
My mission was to take the hour or so of N93 video clips from my week's holiday and compile it into a seamless whole.
Starting Premiere Elements takes a while, but then you get used to that with Adobe software (sigh). Once started, I went to 'Add media', selecting my MP4 files. I then waited. And waited. And waited. Blue progress bars were popping up in a corner of the screen, informing me that Premiere Elements was preparing each file. By which it means checking it (nothing wrong with that) and transcoding it into some sort of native Premiere Elements format, with files ending in .CFA and with the original file sizes.
An hour and a half went by. Finally, the progress bars stopped. But a dialog had popped up on screen informing me that Windows was critically short of system memory and that I should 'save my work and proceed with caution'. Gritting my teeth, I rebooted my PC and restarted Premiere Elements.
Loading up my project, at last I thought I could start work. Even my media files were in the right window, with thumbnails. I double-clicked one of them. Playback in the small preview window was appalling. Now, my PC has no problems decoding DVDs (in software), and can play the exact same video files perfectly at full-screen in Adobe's own Quicktime Player. But how can you edit videos, trying to spot start and stop points, when playback is so jerky (less than one snapshot frame per second often)?
As I struggled on, in the interests of experimentation for AAS, things started to get worse. Many videos taken on the N93 (which again played perfectly in Quicktime Player) were artificially padded out to many minutes long with black nothingness, while others played with no sound, and no information in the Properties window to help out as to what could be wrong.
The web page for Premiere Elements 2.0 states that it needs 256MB of RAM, by which is means that it should run on a PC with 256MB. I had twice this. Interestingly, running Task Manager to play detective revealed that Premiere Elements was grabbing 400MB of RAM just for itself (part of this being in virtual memory, of course). The figure on their web site is complete nonsense. The processor useage is also way off. Even straight after booting, I tried loading the product and immediately playing a video file (with minimal virtual memory use), to see the same playback problem.
In desperation, I sought out the 'Updates' page for Premiere Elements 2.0, to see that there was nothing there that could help. How on earth are other N93 owners editing their video? Did Nokia only test this software on Twin-processor 3GHz 2GB monsters?
The N93 CD comes with an animation with voice-over of a cheery American congratulating me "on choosing Premiere Elements 2.0". Don't believe him. Run a mile. On any real world system, this video editing suite is a bloated, resource-ravenous, inefficient nightmare and best avoided. Nokia, have you sold us a pup? I know we can play our MP4s and do simplistic copying and pasting in Quicktime Player, but what's the point in the N93 if we can't edit our videos properly?
Steve Litchfield, Aug 28, 2006
Update:Ulead's Video Studio 10 Plus now works with N93 videos, so at least there's a viable alternative that works at proper speed on real world PCs.
Categories: Editorial Thoughts
Platforms: S60 3rd Edition
News Discussion
A workaround for simple projects is to use Quicktime Pro and copy and paste, exporting to AVI with a common codec at the end and then using this AVI in a DVD-authoring package.
What about other N93 owners out there? Rafe?
Steve
Importing N93 files worked just fine for me in a 1GB RAM machine. Premier Elements took only a couple of seconds to import each video.
However, playback in the preview window was very jerky (1-2 frames per second). The workaround is to use command "Timeline -> Render work area", or simply hit the ENTER key.
Rendering produces intermediate files that Adobe can display more easily. After rendering, preview is smooth and all frames are shown. However, the rendering operation can take several minutes, so be patient.
Julio
Adobe deserve hanging from the nearest yard arm for this appalling video application and Nokia deserve a severe slap on the wrist for selecting it.
Steve
I downloaded the video of a girl playing (rboutzoom.mp4) from the review. Importing into Premiere took about 4 seconds on my 1.8 Ghz IBM T42P laptop - I do have 2 Gb of RAM though.
Rendering the clip for smooth playback is another story - about 5 minutes for the 26 second clip..
I still find Premiere Elements superior to Nero and Ulead and anything else I have tried. Video Editing is best done with an accelerator card - I have Premiere 6.5 with a Matrox accelerator/capture card on my desktop - that system is optimized for Mpeg2 editing and works fast and well.
I guess we need a new generation of Mpeg4 accelerator cards/chips for this kind of work.
Try stepping forward ONE frame at a time on this video btw - it looks very strange, every 2-4 frames, there are one or more frames that looks like it was exposed twice with a fraction of a second between, giving a ghost image of moving objects. It makes me even more suspicious that there are some kind of interpolation going on - not a true 30 fps capture...
Regards
Michael
Steve
You should have no problems editing files with iDVD and imovie ....
So, on 2002, almost anybody know what to do with the AVI files that come out of FUJI. I try, and try, different softwares.
TMPeg Encoder, was the selection, untill, I found ULEAD Video Studio 8 (today it goes on 10). The encoder (not the interface, that is very confuse) engine of ULEAD is superior to others, and I had used several (memory: TMPeg, Adobe, Magix, Mainconcept, Nero Vision...others).
Fuji produces AVI files, of MotionJPEG, that all the programs I tested work well - 640x480-30fps.
Then, cames N70, with MPEG4, and 352x288-15fps, wich meens, for slow images is enouth, if N70 had good capture image, wich is the case. So I found my self, to do most of my videos with N70... is always with me...
Now, the main question - how to do the encoder for DVD?
Well, with Ulead... Ulead need a MPEG4 plugin to work. Some way, I install a lot of Codec Packs, and Ulead grasped one of them, and works.
So with n70 and now, with N73 (even better) I do videos, and do the encoder process with ULEAD.
The process is not fast, but is far better then with Adobe, that is a heavy program, confuse, and produces outputs of quality lower then ULEAD.
As I started to say, is my experience...
Steve
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Originally Posted by slitchfield
Which would all be well and good, but Ulead VideoStudio 10 Plus currently crashes and burns when asked to import N93 MP4 files 8-(
Steve |
And 8 is lighter and even more confuse on interface, but the files produced are the same quality, they donīt have changed the encoder engine.:icon14:
Thanks,
Steve
Which leaves me absolutely nowhere. I have a week's worth of memories from the N93 that I can't do anything with... Grr....
Steve
Steve
Steve
http://discussions.nokia.co.uk/discu...essage.id=1707
Steve
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Originally Posted by bluestar
Steve, buy a mac or a macbook and you'll definitely forget all your problems with video editing ... this is a windows thing... :D Oh and by the way you will also forget all your problems with computers .... :redface:
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BTW, has anybody had any luck editing videos with the N93's built-in editor? I always get an 'out of memory' error message, even for small videos.
Name: Bokiv
Serial: E2DB-63F6-4816-378D-553E-282F-8172-2BD9
1.DOWNLOAD THE MP4 OFF YOUR N93 TO THE COMPUTER
2.IN THE ENCODER OPEN UP THE MP4 YOU'VE JUST DOWNLOADED OFF THE COMPUTER.
3.ENCODE TO WMV FROM THE PULL DOWN MENU (KEEP CHECKING IT IS CONVERTING TO WMV BECAUSE SOMETIMES IT CHANGES)
4.OPEN UP THE ADOBE PREMIERE ELEMENTS
5.ADD THE FILE WHICH IS NOW A WMV
6.EDIT AS YOU WISH
7.THEN EXPORT AS YOU WISH!
BINGO!!!!!
PLEASE LET ME KNOW HOW YOU GET ON.
Note: My playback of the mp4 files was totally non existent. It may have had something to do with DivX installation and the Radeon graphics card on my Toshiba Satellite laptop, but since trying to update the driver doesn't work (system restore needed ...), I have to live with the bundled driver.
Hopefully now I can get some editing done. On a positive note, the quality of the videos, now that I can finally play around with them, is perfectly acceptable. With any luck, I'll be able to string together something semi decent using that Adobe Premiere Elements bundled program - although I'll miss the storyboard section of Windows Movie Maker ...