I ended up using Sony's Screenblast MovieStudio. It's a $100 program, but frankly I'm stunned by what they packed in for the money.
Some other cool things: My classroom for this had super-nice PCs, but no Firewire. I paid $8 apiece for Lucent-based 3-port jobs, and they came in a retail kit that included a 6-to-4 pin cable and an OEM copy of Ulead MovieFactory v2.
I figured the cables would be $5 or so and I'd already planned to buy them; I was thrilled to not have to. MovieFactory was icing on the cake. It doesn't have any particular editing capabilities, but I figure I can give the copies away or use 'em as incentives or something. MovieFactory is a pretty decent program for making DVD menus and doing xformat-to-MPEG2 conversion.
Anyway...
Hardwarewise, I bought two WinTV PVR-250s and one WinTV PVR-USB2. These cards are not your father's WinTV! Nary a BT878 in sight. These guys are full-on MPEG2 realtime encoders. Wanna cap 1024x768 8000kbps MPEG2 with no dropped frames? How about a 3% CPU load while doing so? 3%!!! That's about the same load you get from playing Solitaire.
OK, granted, the cards only work with WinTV's stupid and ugly (the RAR of vidcap!) TV2000 application - capture isn't exposed to 3rd party apps, but, holy cow. These $180 cards are almost enough to make me reconsider my AIW fetish.
I also demo'd run-of-the-mill bt8x8 cards from ATI (TV Wonder VE) and from Phoebe. ATI's card won't work with the generic driver - it needs MMC, and, honestly, I've never had such a rough time qith ATI-anything as in getting that stupid thing to work. It kept throwing driver errors on the Video Capture Crossbar. Capped fine from MovieStudio, but MMC7.9 would hard lock its host PC. The Phoebe, despite having the worst video quality of anything I've ever capped with, did its generic best, working well with the "Phoebe supplied" Capture app, the bt8x8 generic app, and MovieStudio.
There was also a SapphireTech Radeon 9000 VIVO in attendence. It worked perfectly with MMC, but it exhibited a problem with my editor...
About half my students had DV or Digital8 cameras. The other half brought in everything from 25lb. Beta camcorders (with weird 13-pin video connectors I'd never seen) to VHS-C to Hi-8. DV people have it easy... You plug in the camera and XP just says "Would you like to Capture from this?"... and you can then choose your application and to do things the easy way (go until I say stop) or by time codes.
DV AVI = 12GB/hour. Only down side to DV.
I had to spend a long time encouraging people to use the high-quality formats. A lot of people were just thrilled to death by Windows builtin MovieMaker, which can barely do anything and only saves in dain-bramaged .WMV/.ASF format (and DV AVI). Some of 'em were just stuck on: So this video I'm putting in is either 12GB an hour or 40MB. I'll take 40MB!
<smacks forehead>
The big troublemakers were the combination of ATI cards and Movie Studio.
As I said, Movie Studio has a stunning array of filters and effects builtin. Three simultaneous video tracks, an overlay, two audio tracks. It's super-intuitive compared to Premier, and doesn't demand that I #$%#$-ing render everything every time I preview a change (It tries to render the preview in real time. Good enough for me!)
Most of my students - who can barely handle making folders or launching Freecell, figured out how to add title cards and tweak brightness and color levels with absolutely zero prompting. THAT'S easy.
Even better, every time you start the program, there's an option to run a tutorial that takes someone through capture, simple editing and rendering output, and it literally isn't obtrusive OR condescending! Sweet!
Capture with DV: Dead simple. Shoot. I'm jealous. Why can't I have a DV VCR? The Phoebe card: Output looked awful, but MovieStudio had some device controls; I could change bit rates, resolutions and which connector I was using on the card.
The WinTV PVR cards wouldn't play at all with MovieStudio. I called their tech support to confirm this (since there's essentially zero support on their site). By the way, to answer a question I've been curious about for YEARS, it's pronounced h@p-AUG (spelled Hauppauge). Capture has to be done through their app. No other.
The VIVO worked with MovieStudio, but Moviestudio could not adjust any parameters for the capture. It defaulted to uncompressed AVI frames, 320x200, a rate that works out to 1GB/min. I found that MovieStudio used my last settings in MMC; Sony's site says they just haven't implemented controls for some analog capture devices yet. I guess ATI's devices didn't make the list, common though they might be.
The VE was hell. I knew I had a problem when the student using that machine told me he had a "Insufficient Disk Space to Continue Capture" on a PC with a 120GB drive. Again, no controls in my editor (even though the Phoebe, which is essentially the same hardware, had lots of options), and the MMC that let me make changes to the capture device's settings was locking up the machine every time I started it. It defaulted to 640x480 30fps uncompressed AVI, at a data rate of about 2.2GB/minute.
The disgusting thing about these 2800s is, even with the crummy analog capture cards, absolutely nobody dropped any frames, ever. 2.2GB/minute and no dropped frames? Sweet Zombie Jebus, Coug's right about SiS IDE drivers! Other comments about the suitability of 8MB-cache Samsung drives are dead-on as well.
So what did we do with our movies? Well, I'm still teaching editing - basically by the seat of my pants, since I've spent exactly twenty times the amount of time it takes to install the program (about 30 seconds on a 52x CDROM) on a PC more than the students have, with the software I'm teaching...
Still, we worked text into the overlay layer, to do titles for our videos, added a couple of clips with a sepia colorization filter, some JPGs in a short slideshow, an looped MP3 for background music, cut some boring bits of ceilings and "Is this thing on?" out of everyone's video, re-ordered other frames within our clips and managed to set up crossfade transitions between clips.
I explained all that to two classes of 8 people, all working with different cameras and capture hardware, plus different video tapes in general, in two and a half hours per class.
When we were done, we output our video straight to DVD-Rs - one of MovieFactory's compelling features is native support for DVD. Most of the movies ended up being about 10 minutes long, and needed about 25 minutes to render and write to 4x discs. Then we took the same project and rendered them as .RV files (realvideo), just for comparison.
"The DVD you made has 250MB of data on it, and looks really good. The RealVideo you made is 900kb, and looks awful. See why we like to keep as much video data as possible? See why we like to use the right format for the job?"
I just sat down and started to write a few words about MovieStudio. As I wrote I realized how cool my class was today. I think I ended up sharing more than I planned but, hoolie doolie, there's just about no part of this class I'm not impressed with (except the TV Wonder VE).
