I’ve had the opportunity to go through some of my MiniDV digital camcorder tapes, and have imported quite a few video segments onto the computer.

In the past I had tried using Adobe Premiere, but it was a tremendous resource hog. Sonic Foundry’s Vegas, which I have had for a few years, does a much better job in my opinion. Nothing against Adobe, but I have never been able to get Premiere to work properly, or figure out its strange terminology and interface. Which is odd since I know Photoshop almost instinctively. Vegas uses the same timeline interface that CD Architect does, so even as I dropped my first clips into Vegas several months ago, I figured out the interface fairly quickly, and had usable videos online in a matter of an hour or two.

Transitions between tracks are dead simple. Special transitions are neat, but I still prefer the classic fades between video clips. Rendering is still slow (only a faster hard disk system would help), but results come out perfectly well. I tried doing a video DVD for the first time today with DVD Architect. It took me a little work, but once I figured it out, I made a test video onto a DVD+RW disc and it plays fine. Even the widescree videos rendered properly with the letterboxing on top and bottom of the screen. With Sony now owning Sonic Foundry, I don’t know if this software even exists anymore. But it has so many features that I don’t see a need to upgrade it anytime soon. It makes a DVD for me, and also allows me to save as any one of three or four popular internet-friendly video file formats. Can’t ask for more!