I need to buy a simple and cheap home movie editing program to edit the little films I take with my digital camera and format them for DVD. Does anyone have suggestions? Video editing software that adds music and narrations. These programs can link together short video clips. One warning: Video editing demands a lot of computer resources鈥攅ach hour of video requires 13 gigabytes of hard drive space. You will need at least 512 megabytes of RAM. Anything less will slow down your computer considerably.
1. Windows Movie Maker. If you have Windows XP, you should have Windows Movie Maker 2 (Windows XP only). Click Start, All Programs, Accessories, Entertainment, Windows Movie Maker. If you don鈥檛 find it, you can download it from Microsoft's Web site (www.microsoft.com). Microsoft鈥檚 Web site offers a number of tutorials.
You can assemble clips using the storyboard view. This allows you to drag and drop clips into little boxes at the bottom of your screen (you can change the order of these boxes, too). When you find the order you like, you can add over 50 transitions (fades, dissolves, wipes, etc.) that will link your clips together.
Video effects will slow down, speed up or blur your video. There鈥檚 even an effect that can turn portions of your video into a watercolor painting.
The timeline view allows you to add music, titles or narration.
2. Avid Free DV (www.avid.com/freedv, Windows XP; Mac OS X 10.4.2 or later) offers a fraction of Avid鈥檚 other (and costly) video-editing programs. But it does have some of the features of the full version of Avid.
There are over a dozen free video tutorials on Avid鈥檚 Web site.
Avid Free DV allows you to trim video, edit audio and create titles. Its timeline utilizes two video and two audio tracks and 16 video effects.
3. VirtualDub (www.virtualdub.org; Windows 95 and later)is a very fast, full-featured program.
The video-editing capabilities are limited, but it allows you to trim video and adjust audio. VirtualDub is known for its filters: adjust the brightness; sharpen the picture; blur clips together; rotate pictures; etc. Then you can view the before effects and after effects in the two windows鈥攈ere you can cancel the filter effects.
For the more advanced there is:
Adobe www.adobe.com
Pinnacle www.pinnaclesys.com
Ulead www.ulead.com
Cost: less than $100. windows movie maker
free windows movie maker... that came with my computer... you may be able to download it from the microsoft site for fre... this is what i use... you may even have it on your computer and not even know it... Adobe Premeire Elements works great. Pinnacle Studio (cheap, but crappy), Windows Movie Maker (free and extremly crappy), Canopus Edius Pro (mid-priced and good). use nero 6 burner to edit your video files and put titles...
or else buy an expensive one ULEAD MOVIE EDITOR!!! Windows Movie Maker on Computer all ready form XP |
