Video Studio Gear



Here is a listing of my Video Studio setup. I did a lot of research and bench testing of equipment and software in order to try to achieve the best quality possible within the normal human budget. Some of you may have a different set-up or have a different way of doing something and I hope to to hear your response or recommendations to this article.

First, I use the Sony DCR-VX2000 to do all my video recording. This is the best video camera I used, then again I've only use one other camera and that is the Sony Digital 8. I use Ulead Video Studio 5.0 batch capture to capture video clips to my harddrive. Then I use Ulead Media Studio Pro 6.0 to do all the video editing. This includes text effects, transition effects, filtering, voice narrations, and background music inserting. Once all the editing is complete I encode the entire project timeline as one big AVI file in DV format. Then I use TMPGenc to encode my movie to either MPEG2 for DVD or MPEG1 for Video CD. I use the setting: 2 pass variable bit rate, max bitrate=7000, min bitrate=2500, average bitrate=4700-5000 - This process is the most time consuming, usually 20-24 hours to complete depending on you CPU. Then finally I burn to either a CD-R or DVD-R for viewing on my DVD.

For still images I still use the conventional 35mm camera and scanned into my computer as a digital image. I haven't found the digital cameras to be of equal quality to the old fashion cameras yet.

Well, I hope this is of some help for those of you interested in getting into video editing. Below is a listing the equipment that I use to make everthing possible. It is not by any mean a must have type of thing - it's more a recommendation if you are planning to do this professionally. Feel free to send me an e-mail of questions or comments on anything you like. I'm anxious to meet others out there with my same interest so we can exchange ideas.

  • Camera
       Sony DCR-VX2000 camcorder
       Minolta 7xi hand camera

  • Computer System
       1 gig Pentium 3 dual processor
       4 harddrives 7200rpm ata100 (240 gigs total)
       1.5 gig ram
       64 meg video card
       SB Live Platinum sound card
       Pyro 1394 Firewire card
       19 inch viewsonic monitor
       Apaptec ultra SCSI card
       IOMEGA 2gig JAZ drive
       Epson Expression 636 scanner
       Epson Photo 1280 inkjet printer
       HP Laserjet 4 plus laser printer
       Pioneer DVR-A03 cd/dvd burner

  • Computer Software
       Ulead Video Studio 5.0
       Ulead Media Studio Pro 6.0
       Ulead Photo Impact 7.0
       Adobe PhotoShop 6.0
       Adobe Illustrator 9.0
       TMPGenc 2.02
       Cakewalk Home Studio