Nero Vision 4: Nicely Done! [Archive]

Jason Dunn

05-24-2006, 01:00 PM

<img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/nero-vision-4-small.jpg" /> Quite often you'll see me doing front-page rants on a particular piece of software, and how I wish the company would fix it. This time, I'd like to offer some front-page congratulations to <a href="http://www.nero.com/nero7/eng/Nero_Vision_4.html">Nero Vision 4</a>, the video editing and DVD burning tool that ships with <a href="http://thoughtsmedia.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=12988521/search=nero+7+ultra+edition">Nero 7 Ultra Edition</a>. The <a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/nero-vision-4.jpg">user interface</a> is simple and intuitive. It hides advanced options that can still be accessed easily with a click, minimizing the confusion for new users. Best of all though is that is works with an array of video files as input: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, QuickTime, Nero Digital, AVC, VOB, DV, VCD, SVCD and AVI video files. They don't list it on the product page (which is odd), but it also works with DVR-MS files, the format that Windows Media Center records in. This is extremely important for me, because many applications don't support DVR-MS files and thus editing/burning them is a difficult proposition. The equivalent Roxio product can work with DVR-MS files, but first it re-saves them as straight MPEG2, and if you're doing multiple files there's no "Save All" mode - in other words, Roxio's method is a real hassle (but better than nothing I suppose).<!> Memory usage is a reasonable 127MB of RAM, but most impressive of all, it didn't complain when the video files I wanted to import were on a networked folder. It didn't even copy them locally: 4GB of DVR-MS files, transcoded on the fly to MPEG2 across a gigabit network, and nary a problem with the resulting DVD. That's one good app. Having a good DVR-MS burning tool is especially important for us home-brewed MCE users, because out of the box, MCE 2005 doesn't allow you to burn video DVDs. That's a whole other rant of mine best saved for another day. The application isn't perfect mind you - there's always room for improvement. ;-) Transcoding video is the most CPU-intensive part of the process, and by default the Priority setting in Nero Vision is set at "Normal". At that setting my 1.87 GHZ Pentium M CPU was at 98-99% usage. I changed the priority to "Very Low", which should have the effect of lowering the CPU usage, right? It didn't - on "Very Low" priority the CPU is still churning away at 98-99%. All in all, I give major kudos to Nero for making a fast, simple, and powerful application for doing basic video editing and DVD burning. It also includes a decent number of templates, backgrounds, and other goodies for DVD making. Nero Vision 4 isn't something I'd use for making a complex wedding DVD, but for pretty much everything else, it does the job without fuss. UPDATE: I forgot to mention that when combined with <a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/articles.php?action=expand,9818">AnyDVD</a>, Nero Vision allows you to extract video files directly from commercial DVDs, making it really simple to edit together clips. It's a great combo!

bcries

05-24-2006, 02:35 PM

Sounds good!

Isn't the "priority" setting simply that - it tells the system what to do when multiple apps are competing for heavy CPU usage? If nothing else is standing in the way, I would think that Nero Vision at low priority would still grab as many empty cycles as were available. If you tried to run something else with higher priority, those cycles would get snatched from Nero right away. Still, everything stays close to 100%... this suggests that you have an efficient application and an efficient system, because CPU cycles aren't being wasted while waiting for swap or memory transfer, etc. My heavier encoders often won't get the usage rate up that high, probably because of slower RAM.