MEP 2017 Premium - a few questions

nick_vid wrote on 3/14/2017, 9:39 AM

Hello, I currently use MEP 2016 Premium, but was considering updating it to the new one, but would like to ask if any of these things have been improved or not?

Rendering times, and reliability - I need to render full length DVDs of up to 2 hours and I find the rendering time to be quite slow, sometimes taking 3 hours to complete. And sometimes it randomly crashes when writing the final file, Ive tried many different things and cant seem to find a reason for the crashes, as its not every time. Has the rendering times and reliability been improved in the 2017 edition?

DVD menu design - I find the menus quite basic, and only being able to have 1 text title at the top can be annoying. Especially if I need to make the text into 2 lines with one bigger than the other, I need to design a jpeg in another program with the text in the right place then import it as a background. Would be much easier if it can be done in the same program. Also I find after a DVD has finished playing on a player, it doesnt go back to the first menu page, but the last one. Has this been improved at all in 2017? The same goes for rending Blu-Rays, they seem to take ages compared to Pinnacle Studio.

Is the slow motion any smoother? Currently I find when slowing down a clip it can be abit juddery compared doing the same thing on the same clip in pinnace studio, so I need to do any slow motion clips in Pinnacle first then import them into MEP. Would be alot easier if it was smooth in this program, has that been improved at all?

Is the layout still the same? I think it flows pretty well and having plenty of key shortcuts work well, and Ive got used to where everything is, so hoping its all in the same place, or have there been any layout changes?

Also, are there any better and easier title editing tools? I find editing title presets quite long winded and the colours and title effects are easier to use and better in Pinnacle so again I have to design alot of titles in that, save as a video file then import into this. Have there been any improvements in that?

Any help on these would be great.

Nick.

Comments

browj2 wrote on 3/15/2017, 1:11 PM

Hi Nick,

It's hard to comment on some of this as we don't know exactly what you did.

Here are a couple of comments.

1. On DVD menu design

There are many template designs - did you download and install the extra content?
You can have as many title/text objects as you want. Under Design button, click on + which adds a button. Give the text and parameters that you want and move it where you want. No need to add jpeg images for this.
On the Button or image for the main menus (not chapters), double-click or click on the Edit button under Design button and you will see a list entitled "Action at the end of the film." Select the one that you want.
There are many more things that you can do with the menus. Read this part of the manual thoroughly and try things out.

2. Titling

Pinnacle Studio is notorious for its bad text images (I have it and read the forum often). No such problem in MEP.
"I find editing title presets quite long winded and the colours and title effects are easier to use and better in Pinnacle" - What presets? Do you mean the many different templates? What do you mean by long-winded? There are many options under the title dialog that you can use if needed, but most are just clicking on the button. Changing the text color is simple, just click on the button and select the colour or drag the cross-hairs around to what you want. Of course, if you have specific colours, you can type in the values. I don't see how it could be simpler.
For titling effects, you have first Animation under the main dialogue box, second the templates, and third Size/Position and other effects with keyframing. There are 3D animation titles that use Xara 3D Maker and you can 3D Maker can be used to modify them if you have it. I think that all you need is the trial version for this; some other users may be able to comment here.
Premium comes with NewBlue Titler so you have even more options. There are a couple of tutorials on the French part of this Forum about using it. Here is one of them.
Titling can be simple or extremely complex; it depends on what you want.

3. Crashes - happens occasionally. I really appreciated the exchange on the Pinnacle Forum with a moderator - the question was, so you accept frequent crashes? Answer: Yes

Make sure that you have updated to the latest patch.

4. Rendering - same complaints on the Pinnacle forum as here. Rendering takes a long time and depends on many, many factors. To compare two products, you have to have exactly the same project. Effects take more time to render. I had one project of 1h20 that took 60 hours to encode, and then the result was bad. I had many segments that had Neat Video applied and that can slow the process down to 1 fps. If you have many effects, expect long rendering times. Don't expect rendering to go faster than the video will play; rarely happens. For burning, I always encode first, check the files, and then burn to DVD or BR. And for long projects, I start encoding before going to bed.

After all of that, I don't have 2017, only 2016 and VPX(8). I don't think that you will find much difference between the versions except for the new features. Take a look at the details on Magix.com.