Looking for video editing software (PC)

I used to have Adobe Premiere. It was an older version but it worked well for what I was doing with it (which was stuff like this).

As I’ve changed computers, somewhere along the way I lost Adobe Premiere, so I don’t have it anymore (cry!) and as I really, really can’t afford to buy the new one, I have to find something else. It either has to be free or under, say, $50.

I have tried the Movie Maker software that comes with Windows but it sucks. It doesn’t give you very much control over anything.

At the very least I need to be able to separate the audio and video channel, do transparency and overlapping, and have complete control over text (where, when, for how long, how fast, etc)

Anyone have any suggestions?

I use PureMotion Editstudio for all of mine - I got v4 free on a magazine cover - Puremotion has subsequently been sold off to another company, but Editstudio is still available:
http://www.mediachance.com/video/index.html

It’s a layered nonlinear editor - and you can add as many layers as you like, and into these layers, you drop objects such as pieces of video (their audio automatically arrives, joined, in the layer below, but you can split it off). In order to overlay text, you just drop a text object onto the layer above the video, move the start and end to where you want and edit the object properties to enter the text and style, etc.

And it’s the same for other things too - to tweak colours, you drop in an adjust RGB or adjust HSV object - and it applies to everything directly below it. To fade from one video segment to another, you just overlap the segments on separate layers, then drop a dissolve object on another layer above the overlap and tell it which layer is ‘to’ and which ‘from’ (in most cases it guesses correctly on its own).

It’s very versatile and accepts third party plugins too, and can render/export in just about any format you want, at more or less any resolution you choose.

Everything on this page, and all of the video recipes on this page were edited and produced using it.

Yikes - I just noticed the price - outside your budget. I might have a spare CD of version 4, if you’re interested.

For something close to that price, I’d probably recommend:

Pinnacle Studio 11, which has three versions ranging from $50 to $120.

Adobe makes a stripped down version of Premiere called Premiere Elements. It sells for $100, but there are deals to be found out there. For instance, this $60 firewire card comes with a free copy of Elements.

Is it $89? Is that the software you’re talking about? I could maybe go up to that if it’s as robust as it sounds. It seems like it has a lot of the features I used in Premiere… it has a trial version I might check out, though it puts a watermark on it. If it works out well, though, I could pay for it then recompile the movie without the watermark…

That sounds like a good idea - as I say, I’m only on version 4 and I can’t think of anything I want to do that it won’t handle - but the big, big benefit is that you can just add as many layers as you want - and the whole stack gets rendered. So, for example, suppose you have a bunch of objects (all the same duration and timecode):

Layer 1: Text - the word “fishcake” in red at the top of the screen
Layer 2: Dissolve from layer 4 to layer 3
Layer 3: Text - the word “banana” in blue at the bottom of the screen
Layer 4: Dissolve from Layer 6 to layer 5
Layer 5: HSV adjust desaturating to B/W
Layer 6: Full colour video

-What you’ll end up with is:
Video that fades from colour to black and white, at the same time as the word ‘banana’ fades into existence at the bottom of the screen - titled in red with the word ‘fishcake’ throughout the whole scene.

Also, it’s timeline-oriented, only rendering down to discrete frames when you build/render a project - so the editing is completely non-destructive in every way.

:frowning:
When I import my clips, which play fine elsewhere, that software plays the sound out of sync, like a bad Japanese monster movie. Well poop!

Has anyone used PowerDirector? It gets good reviews here: http://video-editing-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

Hmmm… that’s not so good - and probably not worth trying to fix if you’re still in the market for a program - probably better to choose something else that just works.

Looking elsewhere then - I’ve heard people say good things about Sony Vegas.

Adobe has a downloadable Elements tryout (30 days) here. Click on the popup down the page, choose “Premiere Elements 4.0”, and hit go. Fill out some marketing glurge, then download.

ETA: the download is 2gb; Adobe will also just e-mail you a data DVD if that’s a problem.

oops – obviously I meant “Adobe will also just mail you a data DVD if that’s a problem.”

Hmm. But Premier Elements is $95 to register, where PowerDirector is only $70. PowerDirector also got a higher overall rating on that review site…

(I don’t just need video editing software to do this one thing right now and then never again.I plan on using it regularly in the future, so I don’t want to get something for a 30 day trial that I’m not going to buy.)

Well, that review site you linked to earlier did have some good things to say about Roxio Easy Media Creator, which is what I’ve used to make various DVDs for the family. REMC has some very nice tools, and lots of transition effects, although I haven’t played much with the text effects; I’ve mostly just done slideshows mixed with music and video, but they always turn out well. It’s pretty simple, and it comes with additional programs for DVD burning (supports LightScribe, which is neat), disc labeling, and case art creation. In the latest version, they’ve apparently even added a feature that lets you do one-click uploading to YouTube.

It’s about $99 for the whole shmeer, and for that you’d probably be paying for some features you might not ever use, but it’s a good package overall.

Have you looked at Virtual Edit? When I tried it, it couldn’t import the file format my video was saved in, and as I had another program that could, I used it, instead of trying to figure out what the problem was with Virtual Edit.

Try Mangetouts method and go to a magazine shop and look to see if any of the current computer/video mags have full versions of older software included for free.

If only there were a way to get it cheaper…

Yeah but it still seems like a castrated version of Premiere.

Sony Vegas Movie Studio is $75 and is quite fully featured.

This approach has served me very well in the past - you do have to be a bit careful with video editing programs though - a lot of the cover disk programs are described as ‘full version’, but of the ‘silver edition’ or some such - and sometimes it will turn out that the choices of export format or resolution are limited to VideoCD quality or something.

I didn’t suffer this with my version of Editstudio, but I’ve seen it on a lot of the other packages on magazine covers.