Buyers Guide: Albert Marshall

Ulead Brings teeny weeny Success

by Albert Marshall
Founder teeny weeny wonders

SAN FRANCISCO

teeny weeny wonders is a virtual community that examines and utilizes converging digital technologies for communication. Our core competencies are creative services, consulting, digital content creation for film and television, multimedia services (including DVD, CD, VCD, SVCD) and Webstreaming technology.

Much of the work we do is in the corporate convention/marketing area where we design floor plans with lighting, sound, projection, multi-cam flypacks, scan conversion and routing. In content creation we develop programs for television, shorts for theaters, commercials and independent works for distribution.

In today’s fast moving, price-conscious business environment, we’re finding that our clients need a wide variety of services with immediate delivery. Services range from live streaming, encoding, capturing direct to disk for editing, creating CDs and in some cases video CDs (VCDs) or DVDs.

Artistic groups need basically the same type of services to help market their works for fund raising purposes, bookings and public awareness. Since most of this segment has little or no money for this type of work, the service must be high quality and inexpensive – or it just won’t happen.

What we determined was that we needed to construct a multi-purpose, high quality digital edit system that would be durable, inexpensive to build, simple to operate and reasonable on the client’s budget.

The first level of constructing the system was to decide on the platform. After creating a list of demands we decided on PCs for performance and price considerations. We looked at software suites from A to Z and chose Ulead MediaStudio Pro because of its user interface and hardware independence.

FILM AND TAPE BACKGROUNDS

Many of our editors come from film editing backgrounds and others are from the tape-to-tape days. MediaStudio Pro is based on the A/B roll edit system with an effects track between A and B then overlay tracks acting as key layers or masks tracks.

On the audio side the A/B tracks both have stereo audio tracks associated. Film and tape editors are at home with this layout. When they find out that they can use up to 99 overlay tracks in video or audio, they’re impressed.

A real advantage that MediaStudio Pro for us is its ability to function transparently in a multi-capture card/software codec environment. It has been our experience that capture cards and codecs fall in and out of favor as systems do.

Ulead has managed to design MediaStudio Pro’s suite of applications to cross hardware platforms, PC operating systems cards and capture devices. This really minimizes the learning curve.

We started with Media Studio Pro at Version 2.0. It has now evolved to Version 6.0 and we have found it to be a powerful, flexible tool for editing on location and in a permanent facility.

MediaStudio Pro has been a stable performer for us. Many of our edit sessions continue for 17 to 18 hours in one session. This might continue for three to four days at a time depending on the project.

All of our edit stations have been upgraded to Windows 2000 with twin processors running at 866 MHz, with 133 MHz FSB or higher. Each station is equipped with IEEE-1394 (FireWire) and SCSI, and setup with a variety of plug-ins to satisfy the editor. The systems hardly ever crash.

MediaStudio is also strong in frame-accurate editing. Many projects have come to us shot with lip sync audio on a cassette and the speaker on tape with no sound! We have been able to place the clips on the time line and match them up using the effects features built into Media Studio.

We also found the software waveform/vectorscope to be accurate and powerful. And that’s not all. After using the waveform/vectorscope you can apply filters that can help zero in on the look you want.

Ulead Media Studio Pro is a stable and powerful suite of applications that enables the production team to meet the ever-changing demands of the film/digital content creation marketplace.

Albert Marshall founded teeny weeny wonders in 1982. He can be reached at al@twwusa.com.
For more information, contact Ulead (800-858-5323, www.ulead.com)