I’m attempting to splice together some funny (hopefully) anime-related videos using the collection of DVDs I have and clips from the web. I’ve seen professionals do it with their fancy software that probably costs an arm and a leg, but I don’t want to spend anything before I know if I’m 1) good at it, and 2) like it.
Right now, I’ve put together some random clips using Windows Movie Maker, which sucks. It’s probably unwieldy and stuff, but the main reason I hate it is it loses resolution even when the file is originally 640x480! So most importantly, right off the bat, I need an editor that lets me save the spliced movies with the exact same resolution as the original file. Anyone know any?
If you’re just talking about splicing and no fancy effects, virtual dub works well and quickly.
Personally, I use kdenlive for the few times I need to edit videos, which is more friendly and more capable wrt effects, but that’s not available as a windows binary - though they do offer virtualbox images (virtualbox is free too) and a live dvd that should work on windows pcs.
Yeah, no fancy effects yet, I’m a complete novice. I just want to clip some scenes together and add a song, that’s all. I’ve got some DVDs and some ideas that might be funny, so I want to see how well that would work if I actually buckled down and tried to do one.
I am a little vague as to how “free” this is but you might try AVS Video Editor.
They have a payment scheme but looks like you can try the program for free…I think. It seems if you want to use any of the other stuff you have to pay. Till the end of the month it is $39 for one year or $59 for an unlimited subscription which, they claim, is 70% off the usual price.
I think you can try it for free though (not sure).
I agree that WMM is a fairly crude bit of software, but I think you have more control over the output than you think - as far as I remember, most of the export options are very preset in their outcome, but one of them, at least, allows you to choose the codec and output resolution you want. I’ll post back later if I can work this out…
In the meantime, you might also want to have a look at WAX - it’s mostly aimed at effects processing, but is quite capable of performing more conventional multilayered video editing too.
While there is no custom option (at least on XP), you can save at 640x480. When you get to the movie setting screen, choose the “Show more choices” (if it isn’t shown already). Then choose “Video for local playback (2.1 Mbps),” [not “video for local playback (2.1 Mbps NTSC)”] which should be set at the proper resolution.
If you find this is not the case, then I believe you will find VirtualDub to be a sufficient solution. It worked similarly enough to movie maker that, when I had to use it to crop a video, I found the option quickly enough (even though it isn’t quite obvious.) If you us3e it, I suggest saving to Microsoft’s MPEG-4 3.0 codec for easy use on YouTube. So far that has never let me down.