Digital Home Thoughts: Nero Vision 4: Nicely Done!

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 Nero Vision 4, the video editing and DVD burning tool that ships with Nero 7 Ultra Edition. The user interface 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 AnyDVD, 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!