Editing video on Windows 7: No sound

by philg

I’m experimenting with video editing software for a Sony HDR-CX350V camcorder. This captures video in AVCHD format, one quality step up from the Flip’s works-everywhere .mp4.

I thought “For trimming and assembly editing, surely I don’t need a heavyweight solution such as Adobe Premiere. Perhaps Windows Live Movie Maker, bundled free with Windows, will be sufficient and simpler.” So I downloaded Movie Maker and found that it could play the AVCHD videos, but there was no sound. The computer clearly has the necessary codecs to play the sound because the unedited AVCHD files would play in Windows Media Player. One theory for why this failed is that some versions of Windows 7 have the Dolby sound codec disabled, perhaps so that Microsoft doesn’t have to pay royalties to Dolby? The computer had originally been shipped with Windows Vista and was upgraded to Windows 7 Home Premium. Windows Live may have erroneously decided not to work (as far as we can tell, it is supposed to work with AVCHD files on “home premium”).

So… you’ve got an operating system that nobody understands what it does. And it comes in about seven different versions, whose distinguishing features nobody can remember. And possibly the Microsoft programmers were tasked with breaking stuff intentionally on top of their usual job of breaking stuff unintentionally.

The software shipped on DVD-ROM with the $800 Sony is much less powerful than what comes on a $100 Flip. You can’t even rename a clip from inside the Sony browser. Meanwhile the files produced by the camcorder are useless for sharing unless you go through some transcoding, so the software becomes much more critical than on the Flip.

I think it is time to give up on Microsoft. What are some alternatives, other than the obvious ones of spending big $$ on a copy of Adobe Premiere or a Macintosh (I assume the bundled iMovie software would have no trouble with AVCHD)?

22 thoughts on “Editing video on Windows 7: No sound”

  1. Isn’t there something called ubuntu -studio made for handling video? I had vista on an hp desktop and when a bug in the disk driver corrupted my main drive I had enough. I found some minor issues with ubuntu when I switched almost 2 yrs ago but each release seems to have fixed everything that bugged me so I’m happy (being an ex UNIX guy that is). Maybe others can comment on the studio release itself.

  2. You got me curious, so I found an AVHCD sample video from a Canon at http://37prime.com/news/?p=1010 and I tried to open it, I am on Windows 7-64 Professional.

    Windows Media Player and VLC had no trouble playing the video and the sound was fine.

    Windows Movie Maker can’t even play the video.

    I bet you it is a problem with some stupid codec missing, or Windows Movie Maker not seeing a required codec.

    For reference I also opened a 720p MPEG4 video made with my Sony DSC-W290 and Windows Movie Maker had no trouble with either the video or the audio, so obviously Windows Movie Maker is not 100% dead.

  3. I have a Canon HF200 and I use Cyberlink Power Director to edit my video files. I think it works pretty well, but I’m still using Vista Home Premium and it can’t handle .mts files natively so I use VLC video player.

  6. iMovie and Final Cut are not very good at editing AVCHD either. I believe iMovie can only do so after transcoding it to something else on import. Final Cut can do it but it’s so poor that people just end up transcoding to ProRes first anyway.

    One of my friends who shoots AVCHD on his Canon 7D and just upgraded to Premiere CS5 reports it works very well on that – also on Windows 7.

    Have you tried Sony Vegas?

  7. Jin: Thanks for the link. My friend John and I saw that page also, in attempting to get this to work last night, which is why I conjecture that the problem might be that the computer did not come out of the box with Win7.

    Hanan: Thanks for the Corel idea. $80 seems like a fair price for a home user. You’d think that Sony would have negotiate a $25 deal for this software for their customers who don’t already have a working video editing environment.

    Pedro: Thanks for the test. Maybe we are the only people who have ever tried to use this software! I too found that Movie Maker could play one of the sample videos that was on the hard drive (WMV format?) with sound, so the software is definitely working to some extent.

    Microsoft programmers who might read this: Would it be so hard to play “you are missing a codec and you can download it from xxx.com” through the sound card in this situation, rather than silently failing?

  8. Bas: I have not tried Sony Vegas. They make a $45 version and a $600 version, and then a couple more in between, just for fun. Which one are you talking about? Do all use the same basic timeline idea as the other video editing programs (e.g., Premiere)? How does Vegas compare to the Corel software that Hanan mentioned?

  9. On the Macintosh I use Final Cut Express, and with AVCHD files from a Panasonic digital camcorder you can’t just drag the files onto the timeline like normal, simple formats. AVCHD “files” contain a bunch of files, and you need to do a Log & Transfer, just as though you were bringing in material from video tape. Final Cut can understand AVCHD only via log and transfer.

    For major projects this isn’t a problem, since you need to look and and log all your video anyway. I’ve never used the camera for more informal shooting, but I guess the format could be a bit more trouble in such cases.

  10. Mark: Thanks. I definitely don’t want to do more steps than are entailed with the Flip and its bundled software. I want to rename files, drag a few clips together into a project, and then select in/out points. Then I want the software to render an archival high-quality version (ideally this would be the camera-original data, trimmed, without decompression and recompression) and a low quality .mp4.

  11. Instead of spending big bucks for Adobe Premiere, try the Elements version. It’s surprisingly capable – and so much better than Windows Movie Maker. You can download and try it for free to test the AVCHD before spending the money, too.

  12. I have had great success for home audio recording with a product by Sony called ACID music studio. As mentioned above, they have a video version of the software as well (The $100 version specifically addresses AVCHD):

    http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegassoftware

    It also has a trial version that you could check out. On a basic level it works in a timeline like just about every other video editor on the planet.

  13. Phil,
    Talk about timely. I have a Sony Handicam HDR-SR11 and it produces AVCHD which Windows Live Movie Maker has no problem with either audio or video on my Windows 7 Professional OS machine. The source of my frustration is trying to do a simple editing task, where I start with a person, in this case a hockey coach in frame talking about a game. I want to keep his audio going while the video cuts (dissolves) to hockey players playing. In the current version of WLMM you cannot do this, and the advice given from Microsoft is to suggest this for the next release. I thought I had done this in the prior version of Microsoft’s Movie maker software, but I’m not sure.

    Like the man says “You can’t get there from here” with this software.

  14. I use Vegas for work and I love it, but don’t have the same camera you do. The Vegas free trials are FULL versions and don’t have any missing features. One tip: never install a trial version on a machine that has an older version. If you uninstall the trial version, it will delete some of the shared folders that the older version needs. (To be fair, Sony may have corrected this but it bit me once in the ass so now I install all new Vegas trials in virtual machines and then wipe the virtual machines when I’m done.)

    Vegas does software rendering, so it renders the video on the fly while you are editing. This is nice if you are doing something uncomplicated and simple. Any complicated effects or gradient blending is going to seriously chunk up on playback, however, and at times it freezes up entirely until the gradient effect is over. This is highly annoying when trying to get the timing exactly right for certain video transitions. Of course these are all playback issues and will not affect the final render, and you can create a “loop region” and render just a portion of the video to see how the effect will really look with the final render settings.

    One thing I like about Vegas is the ability to save a copy of the .veg file in a new folder with trimmed copies of all of the media used to create it. (Other video editors may have this feature as well.) It’s nice because one can go back and re-render everything with new render settings, without having to worry about which drive the footage is on, and whether or not that drive is connected to the computer.

  15. Count one more vote for Vegas. I love it. More importantly, it’s also a decent DAW, which makes sense due to the fact it evolved from their audio products.

  16. Vegas fans: Which of the versions do I need? http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/moviestudiope/compare says that the $45 version will handle AVCHD files. For basic trimming and assembly is there any need for a more expensive version?

    [Note: A moderator emailed me to say that he had declined to approve a bunch of “Don’t buy a $45 program from Sony when you can buy a $2000 Macintosh system instead.”]

  17. Phil,
    It looks to me like I would have to go to the $129 level to get the feature I need to separate audio and video, for the voice over effect, which seems like a basic editing technique to me.

    From the general description: Includes Sound Forge Audio Studio 10 with Vocal Eraser tool.

    I could use a vocal Eraser at times.

  20. You’ll probably want to skip the $49 version as the following features are only in the $99/$129/$699 versions
    * dvd authoring/burning
    * slideshow creator
    * AVCHD device explorer (directly pull video off device)
    * audio timestretching

    I don’t see any reason to get the $129 version over the $99 version, but since Amazon has it for $103 shipped ($73 after a $30 rebate) it might be worth $4 just in case.
    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B003L51CZ8/duckiesorg-20/

  22. Downloaded the beta version of Windows Live Moviemaker. It crashes as soon as a video is added to a project.

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