Brendan Hughes

Just bought a camcorder which records onto sony memory stick, AVCHD. I have never done video editing before. My wife would like to be able to make little documentaries (she's ex-TV journalist but only worked with magnetic tape). So, frame by frame editing, possible adding of sound and/or subtitles, adding clips together, a few things like that. I don’t think we need psychedelic special effects at the moment. Some stuff should also be burned to DVD to send to relatives.

Have a new home PC, 3.0GHz, 1GB RAM, and something reasonable like a 200GB HDD. I installed the Sony Picture Motion Browser s/w which looks nice but seems to be capable of nothing more than taking the ends off the clips (in point /out point). It also seems to need a lot of thinking when editing, pausing for 10 secs while editing, suggesting not nearly enough RAM. I have various little background progs like ZA, Skype, Avast AV etc but nothing huge.

1. Do I need more RAM, or should it be enough and I should look for other problems?

2. What’s a decent (easy to learn, quite capable) free video editing package? I can find plenty with Google, but rather than installing six and taking a few months to decide which five to uninstall, your experience would be appreciated . Examples given are MS Movie Maker, wax, zwei-stein, AVID free (no longer available?). Something with good tutorials or a user group would be nice too. (Movie Maker for Dummies is a distinct possibility, I like the Dummies books )

Many thanks

Brendan

BTW really sorry if this is a FAQ, I don’t venture much in here

boxst

Hello

I use Microsoft Movie Maker. It is free, installed with XP SP2 onwards and it does a reasonable job.

It really depends what you need, I also have Adobe Premier and it is WAY beyond what I need and as such has the complexitity to match.

Movie Maker: Convert the clip, cut segments, re-adjust the sound, add titles, you are done.

Steve

spectrum48k

Check out Ulead's site - they're very user-friendly.
Multimedia Software Developer: Ulead Systems

More advanced would be Adobe Premiere.

Hanley

Pinnacle Studio 10

boxst

Having just read your message properly -- you'll need a bigger hard disk. You should edit in 'raw' format and then compress it down when you've finished.

This takes up LOTS of space.

Steve

John@TunerUK

I've made quite a few videos using pinnacles studio products, but I've now realised it's limitations. I'm looking at Adobe Premier, but not liking the price!

Brendan Hughes

Steve et al, thanks. I browsed around, and the jury is out as to whether MM can handle AVCHD yet. Something about you can only export in Standard Def. I also read about people using fancy effects and leaving the disc overnight to finalise...

Bigger HDD? I would have thought more RAM, but HDD should be OK...?

Guess I can just start playing and see where I get to

John@TunerUK

Well, 1 hour of DV footage is roughly 20Gb, so you'd only be able to fit a few hours of footage on. Get yourself a 500Gb external hdd

john_s

iTrader: (1)

The first thing I'd do with that PC would be to double the RAM. It's not expensive, and there should be a noticeable increase in performance.

Can't recommend any software (I've never tried video editing) the BIL does quite a lot. I think it's Pinnacle he uses.

Iain Young

I used to use Pinnacle, but got fed up with the number of bugs in the software and the terrible customer support. Premiere Elements is much better for frame editing, (and is generally a lot more stable) although it hasn't got as many fancy transitions built in. Premiere Pro is even better, but then again it does cost more

John@TunerUK

Crashing the thread a little for my own ends, but Brendan might find this useful too. Transitions asside, would you say that Premier Elements can do more than Pinnacle? TBH the transitions don't bother me so much, it's when I want to do something simple like reverse a clip, or pause a clip, and then find that pinnacle can't do this without having to find third party plugins.
To me the ability to be able to reverse a clip especially is basic, and I was surprised when it wasn't an option.

spectrum48k

Adobe Premiere is ok, but I'd also have a look at the free trial of Ulead Media Studio Pro (Ulead's more professional video editing package).

Remember if you have a dual core (or quad core) processor setup, Adobe will see it and use it. And as someone said, its nice to have a spare FAST hard drive dedicated to your video editing files. External USB won't be anywhere near as fast as a nice SATA drive (or SCSI if you have the cash!)

Sonic'

Adobe Premiere for me too

Tried some of the others mentioned here and tbh I thought they sucked in comparison to Premiere