Jason Dunn
12-12-2005, 01:00 AM
If you've never plunked a WMV file into an editor and tried to work with it, you're in for a bit of a shock the first time you do: they're painfully slow to edit. I'm using Premiere Elements 2.0 to edit a Photo Story video, and it's amazing how much slower WMV is to work with than AVI. I believe it's because of the compression level - DV-AVI from a camcorder is lightly compressed (around 5 to 1), so it's easy to quickly decompress for previews, edits, etc. WMV files, on the other hand, are highly compressed (100 to 1 or more) and take much more CPU power to decompress and work with. In Premiere 2.0 you can press the Enter key to have it render the video - once the video is rendered you can preview the WMV at full speed. What makes this issue even more painful is that if you have an WMV file on one track and an AVI file on the other track, and you trim/cut the AVI file in any way, it forces the WMV to be non-rendered, slowing everything down again. Irritating.
So the moral of this story is, avoid having to edit WMV files if at all possible - and if you have to edit them, bring along a lot of patience. I find myself wishing that Photo Story had an AVI export option, because WMV is a huge pain to edit.
So the moral of this story is, avoid having to edit WMV files if at all possible - and if you have to edit them, bring along a lot of patience. I find myself wishing that Photo Story had an AVI export option, because WMV is a huge pain to edit.