I got a shiny new awesome digital camera for x-mas. (I’ve never had a digital camera before, so to me, just about anything is awesome.) It’a an HP photosmart 435, 3.1 megapixels. It’s cute. I should also mention I’ve never had a camcorder, either, since this thing takes video, too, and to me, that is even more awesome than its previous awesome-ness. With a clear 128MB memory card I can take about 10 minutes of video. That’s really cool.
So, now I’m thinking I would like to do stuff with the video I take, so I need some sort of video-editing software. So I need recommendations.
I don’t need a whole lot of complicated options or anything, what I really want to do is make a short, probably crappy music video, so I just need to be able to cut clips, take the sound out of them, and put them together with music background. That shouldn’t be hard, right?
I need something pretty cheap, too, since I am a poor college student. Also, I’m running WinME on a 2 and a half year old HP… I could look up other specs and such if they’re important.
There are a number of free video editing programs available, but they all have steep learning curves and are more or less dependent on the video format. What format does your camera record in? MPEG1, MPEG2, AVI, a proprietary format of Kodak’s own, something else?
For MPEG editing try TMPEGEnc, for AVI editing try VirtualDub. Both are free, powerful, and hard to use.
It records in MPEG format, apparently: the files are .mpg files. I don’t know 1, 2, whatever (I’m telling you, I’m very very new at this. ) Thanks for the help so far, any other suggestions are greatly appreciated.
AntaresJB, you do realize that 10 minutes of video that fits into 128mb (or 210k bytes/sec) will look fairly mediocre at best when viewed on a TV, right?
I would probably go with Ulead VideoStudio myself ($100). The only thing cheaper I’ve used is VideoWave (now by Roxio for $50) but I don’t like it’s interface or lack of fine control. But they’re both easier than the TMPEGenc or VirtualDub recommended above. Both of those will do exactly what you want (join clips and swap audio around), but they won’t do wipes, fades, special effects or titling like you might want for a music video.
Don’t forget that Microsoft has their own free product: Movie Maker 2.
It’s sort of like ULead – each one has some minor cool feature that the other lacks, but they are essentially the same.
The one dealbreaker for me was that Movie Maker 2 did not do SVCD (at the time I was using it), so I went with ULead.
I agree, the video that you get with a digital camera is not all that good. I would not advise investing to much in software. It might make more sense to ditch WIN ME and upgrade to XP with the video editing it has built in and you will get a better Operating System.
