Does anyone have any experience making homemade movies with–hopefully–freeware or shareware?
Any suggestions or recommendations?
Thanks.
I’ve made a couple of short films (22 minutes and under) with iMovie and iDVD. Not really free, but they come bundled with Mac OSX, if that’s what you’re using.
You could check SourceForge.net’s multimedia page and see if anything there matches your needs and OS (I think it’s mostly Linux stuff, but am not sure).
Thanks, jack. I shoulda mentioned I’m on Windows. I’ll keep looking.
I’ve edited a few short films and produced them for DVD, on zero budget.
For editing, I used Editstudio 2 - I got this free on a magazine covermount - it’s a fully-functional version; they hope you’ll be so impressed, you’ll upgrade to the latest version. V2 was fine for my needs though.
Getting a decent editing package is probably going to be the most difficult part for you, I think, but there are open source and freeware editors out there.
I output the edited video as AVI encoded with the HuffYUV codec (free), which uses lossless compression, but manages to achieve a fairly compression ratio.
Once you’ve installed the codec, it becomes available as an option in most applications that allow you to save video in AVI file format.
I compressed the video in MPEG2 format (which is what DVDs use) using bbMPEG (free). It also multiplexes the video and audio together.
I put the DVD content (menus, different bits of video, images, text, transitions) together using DVDStyler (free). The Windows version doesn’t write directly to DVD, so I saved the output as an ISO file and burned it to the media using the free ‘light’ version of DeepBurner.
Lots of people have told me I’m making it far too complicated and breaking it down into too many steps, however, apart from being able to do it completely free this way, managing each individual part of the process gives me much more control over the final product - I can, for example, tweak every aspect of the MPEG 2 compression process - giving me control over (amongst other things) the quality of the final product, or the space it will occupy on the disc.
I also found that a lot of the ‘all in one’ DVD production packages don’t give you absolute control over the DVD menus and navigation - it’s typically template-based, whereas with DVDStyler, you design the screen layout a bit like doing a Powerpoint slide, and you can create short video transitions and use these to sweep from the menu into the video.
There are loads and loads of great free bits of software out there for manipulating video in Windows; take a look at the tools section of Videohelp.com
Video Software Downloads - VideoHelp
I meant to add… if you’re doing it piecemeal like I did, it’s quite important to get the resolution and frame rate of the video and the sample frequency of the audio right at as early a stage as possible - in my case, when I render the EditStudio project to AVI.
PAL video needs to be 720x576 at 25fps; NTSC needs 720x540 at 30fps
Audio needs to be sampled at 48khz - if you use 44.1 (CD quality), it will either not work at all, or the DVD will play (audio and video) about 9% faster than it should.
Nitpick: NTSC DVD is 720x480 at 29.97fps.
Oops, thanks.
As far as free video editing software goes… (note: I can’t vouch for any of these–I used Windows Movie Maker for a while, then bought something a bit higher end, so I have no idea what capabilities they have or how easy they are to use, but you can check them out)
Zwei-Stein
ZS4
Jahshaka
DDClip Free
Mangetout, random curiosity speaking–any particular reason you use HuffyYUV instead of Lagarith?
I settled on HuffYUV because it seemed to do the job - producing a file of tolerable size with no compression losses - Never heard of Lagarith, but I’ll check it out and if it’s better, I’ll probably use it.
I have tried Zwei-Stein, ZS4 and Jahshaka - I couldn’t get past the learning curve with them, despite trying really hard. ZS4 turns the mouse cursor into a banana, which I really didn’t like.
WAX was usable enough that I didn’t immediately uninstall it. Likewise AVITricks
I believe Windows Movie Maker comes standard on most new-ish machines, so you probably already have it. It’s not the greatest, but it gets the job done. So far I’ve used it three times: to make a Christmas present for my grandparents (DVD of photos of all the grandchildren from various stages); to make a 1st anniversary present for my recently married sister (DVD of photos and digital video clips from her wedding, collected from everyone I knew who was there); and to make a vacation video (which I’ve put online, and everyone who’s seen it likes it, or at least lied and said they did). It allows you to add titles, music, transitions, etc. – all the basics. It’s not very fancy-schmancy, but I’m very happy with the results so far.
Check out Avid Free DV.
Thanks, DragonAsh. I’ve been wanting to check out Avid for a while; I’m downloading this now.
It says it only works with OSX 10.4.2 or .3; I’m using 10.4.8. Hope that won’t be a deal-breaker.
It was a deal-breaker. From here:
Rats.