The New Look 2
Continuing with the new look issue, I have to say I really like the change. I was really tired of the classic Windows look and I always liked the Mac OS look much more, only that I couldn’t use it for everything because of the too frequent crashes in the classic OS, and OS X may be rock stable but on my Power Mac G3 is horribly slow and most of the popular apps are not ported to it yet. Most Mac religious users say Windows XP look is a copy of Mac OS X, something with which I disagree. I think the new Windows look has a personality of its own and the only point of relation with Mac OS X is that both systems have a renewed and better look compared to their predecessors.
I specially love the "silver" look for the taskbar and title bars, scrollbar and many other parts of the GUI. Both the "blue" and "Olive Green" modes look as if they were part of those add-on products for adding skins to the OS. The only flaw I see in this is that Microsoft only included three of them, and I think they should’ve taken the time to design at least six different ones. But at least they got it right with one of them, with a beautiful metal look and a stunning metallic green Start button.
(click to enlarge)
But some parts of the interface seem like a half done work. For example, the title bar is skinned all over, but the menu and toolbar remain the same as usual, except for the change in the look of the icons. Thankfully, The XP Tweak UI which can be downloaded for free allows to easily change the Windows and Internet Explorer menu and toolbar background to anything you design and want to put there, as you can see in the next screenshot. I haven’t tried for that any other format but .bmp, but considering it is the native Windows format, I would avoid any other. BMP works just fine for the task, and any graphics program can convert whatever you do to it.
Video Editing
I didn’t notice any problems in video editing and playback in XP. So far, video behaves as it does in Windows 2000. The most popular codecs such as PicVideo, Divx 4.11, Mainconcept DV, HuffYuv work with no problems, Avi_IO captures just fine if the capture drivers are available and Virtual Dub works exactly the same as in any version of Windows. Adobe Premiere 6 works just the same as in Windows 2000, editing in NTSC DV format I haven’t found major problemsl, at least not more than in Win 2000.
Switching to XP for video editing from Windows 2000 provides no substantial advantage, while doing it from Windows 98/Me has advantages and disadvantages. Windows XP’s native file system is NTFS, which has a file size limit in the area of terabytes, so you can capture or export hours of video and have only one file per capture. With Windows 98/Me, you’re restricted to the FAT32 file system which doesn’t support files larger than 4 GBs, so you end up with segmented files. That’s not a big problem itself, but can be a huge annoyance sometimes, for example in Premiere, where you can import as many segments as you want, but exporting in segments of a certain size requires knowing the particular codec you’re using to calculate based on time and codec compression, and export the segments manually one by one. After Effects provides automatic file segmenting for export, but it doesn’t cut the segments right and there is audio lost at the end or beginning some times. So with NTFS you don’t have to care about segmenting, you can export all the work and it will only be one file.
Of course the problem comes if you don’t work with the DirectX or Mainconcept DV codecs and use either a DV or MJPEG card with their own drivers that don’t yet support Windows XP. Some models already support it and others not, although probably most brands will have to support XP in the future at some point now that the 9x kernel is gone for good. But if you have a card with bad support for Windows 2000 and XP it’s still a good idea to keep a first partition with Win 98/Me and a second for Windows XP to do all the other tasks. If you have Windows 2000 and your editing card is well supported in it, chances are it will work fine in XP with the Windows 2000 drivers, although not in all cases. Even with the same brand and model, I read many reports of people having success with that and others that didn’t. In any case, you should always check your card’s website to see if any XP drivers are available, and if you plan to buy one, only get one that has XP drivers available in final release status.
The Windows Media Encoder 7.1 installs and works fine in XP, although I never use it because I don’t like to be constrained to use Microsoft’s proprietary codecs that are good only for coding but impossible to transcode again to some other format. To me the best codec around for high video compression is Divx 4.11, which is a system-wide codec and I can use any tool of my choice to encode to, such as Virtual Dub, with the advantage that if one day I need to use a segment of my Divx library to put on a video edition, I can transcode again to whatever codec I’m using for editing. All those stupid copyright restrictions impose barriers to pirates but also affect people that don’t use high compression codecs for DVD piracy but for other purposes instead, such as home movies or segments of TV shows not available for sale.
Windows Media Player 8 is more or less the same as 7.1, only better looking and with more skins, although most of them are truly horrible and I always use the default one.
