Video-editing software recommendations?

[Accessdabbler]

Can anyone recommend some software for editing video? Preferably cheap to free  

I have an ATI TV Wonder Pro capture card and I've recorded some home video of New Zealand to disk as a native ATI VCR file type. I can convert the file to MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 however I don't have any software to edit the file (I assumed some rudimentary software would have come with the capture card.... read the box next time!).

Any suggestions welcome.

[ogryzek]

There aren't any really cheap video editing software, that would be any good...  However take a look at the two packages I am listing below.

Movie Edit Pro from Magix is geared toward home 'DV camcorder editing and burning to DVD' market.  I prefer it over popular mainstream packages (from Pinnacle and Ulead).
http://www.magix.com
(note: do not go for e-version; full box only)

Edit Studio from Pure Motion might be your best $100 pure video editor (however it can be nicely matched with DVD Lab - that thing will do menus on par with prosumer authoring packages)
http://www.mediachance.com/video/index.html

[Accessdabbler]

Thanks, I'll look into them.

For now, I found a shareware version of ULead's Video Studio7. I've got 30 days to edit before it dies on me....

[ogryzek]

The major problem I had with Ulead's Video Studio was its handling of captured footage off the DVD camera.  It would basically break the movie into scene by scene portions.  If you shoot short (lets say under 2 ~ 3min) takes that breaks your footage into hundreds of separate small files.  (I don't remember if you can force it to ignore scene changes)

I would rather have a one large movie file with scene / chapter breaks done 'internally'.

Try free trial of the Edit Studio...

[ogryzek]

So I was cleaning my 'archives partition' when I stumbled into my video related downloads.

1. MS Video Maker 2 - if you have XP (only) that is a great FREE alternative.

2. VirtualDub - (at virtualdub.org) another FREE (under GPL) capture and editing tool.

[Accessdabbler]

Ran into problems editing the video. Maybe you can suggest something....

Each tape is about 2 hours long (there are 4 of them!). I recorded one to the hard drive in the ATI VCR format (native to the ATI capture card). The 2-hour file was about 5 Gigs. I then converted it to MPG so that ULead could read it (slightly larger file size).

The problem is, the file is so big, it takes too long to do simple edits (basically, for now, I'm deleting scenes where the cap was over the lens, scene is too dark and other human errors).

So, here are my questions (so far):

1. Is this the "right" way to record a tape to disk? Should I be recording smaller segments at a time from each tape? I'd prefer to not sit here with my hand over the STOP button waiting for a logical break in the footage.

2. If I open a segment in a video-editing program then delete certain parts and save it, does the process of creating the MPG file do some lossy compression? In other words, if I open an edited file and edit it again, will I keep compounding the losses? In the still-image world, I always worked with a TIF file and made a final JPG only when the photo was "finished". If I needed to change the photo again, I'd work on the original TIF.

More to come...

[ogryzek]

In my experience creating any file over 4Gig creates some problems, not as much with editing software but rather with Windows / DVD UDF limitations (I had to break them down in order to back them up properly).  Normally I want to dump unedited footage to DVD+R for archival purposes.  So I capture the whole tape to a single file, than break the uncut footage into 2 or 3 smaller portions (based on some loosely ‘logical’ stop-points; of course I make sure not to overwrite my original ‘big’ file).  Those smaller files get saved to a DVD disk (and that goes into my library of raw footage).  In the editing software, however, I start with that one single ‘big’ file.

To answer your second question…  The video editing software (usually) does not make changes to the video file itself; it rather creates a list of your edits and applies those transparently on the fly (nowadays in real time) only while you are within that software and with your project open.  However, if you render (output / export) your video with edits (applied to it) to a file (and hopefully you give it a new name), from that point all those edits will become the part of the footage itself.  Do you want to do that often?  Not really, but if you have too many edits, portions removed, transitions and titles applied, maybe some scenes reshuffled in the timeline, soundtrack added, etc., with consumer type products (at least the ones I tried) the video editing program can get so bogged down and so ‘confused’ that it is advisable to render to sort of interim file.  You could than start from that point and continue to refine your video.

I would, however, capture (or convert) my video footage to AVI file (preferably with audio embedded in it – otherwise if you are not careful you might run into synchronization problems).  From what I’ve seen that would be the most ‘compatible’ format across editing software; not to mention one of the highest quality on a PC.  That would resolve any misgivings concerning working with MPEG and would prohibit generation loss if you decide to render to interim file.  Of course at the end, just before burning, that video will be converted to MPEG-2 anyway.

Also, do you capture off the analog tape?

[Jim P]

I use Pinnacle Studio for video edits and dvd mastering.  I've also used Magix and Ulead for editing and I think they're both pretty good, although the versions I used didn't come close to Pinnacle for features like transitions, brightness, and others.

Capturing video mainly depends on what kind of camera you've got.  If you have a DV camera with a firewire port, use that to move video from the camera to your pc.  If your camera only has analog output, you need to use an analog capture device and it's software.  If you've got an old analog camera and a new DV camera, you may be able to pass-through the old camera through the new - if your new camera has analog inputs and a firewire port (this will allow the new camera to digitze the old analog video, instead of using a capture card).

DV capture is really just transferring a file from a source to your pc as uncompressed chunks of AVI format data.  I don't use the capture feature of editing software for this - instead I use a shareware firewire capture program called Scenalyzer, which gives good control over the process.  There's a freeware program called DVIO that works very well, but doesn't give as much control.

Analog capture is more complicated because hardware on your pc needs to digitize the video signal in real time.  Doing compression at the same time will use more pc resource, and may limit your editing software or may limit your video frame size (if your pc can't handle realtime compression at full frame).

If you do compress your capture file, you'll probably need to wait an awful long time for your final video to render, because the editing program will need to uncompress and recompress (over and over, for each scene) - or it might just crash.

Whether you're capturing uncompressed DV or uncompressed analog, your capture program should allow you to specify how to split the files - either by size or by scene detection.  Relatively small file sizes (say 1 or 2 gigabytes each) will make storage and editing a lot more convenient.  Your editing software should take care of scene detection when you import the AVI file.

When you edit and render your video, generally all of the raw video files need to be local - if you archive capture files to DVD-R, you'll probably need to copy them back to your hard drive to use them in a project.  A hour of uncompressed DV uses about 12 gigabytes of storage.  Jim

[ogryzek]

Jim P - what ver of Pinnacle Studio are you using?  My ver 8 had a nasty habit of giving up when too many changes were made to the project.  I would use it however for capture purposes, since Magix had issues with non-synchronized captures (of course they blame it on Microsoft...)  Anyway, (in a great tradition of 'mine is better than yours') Magix Movie Edit Pro has consistently been rated higher by industry magazines.  On the other hand that DV capture utility (Scenalyzer) looks extremely promising - if it does what they claim I won't have to use Studio at all.  Thanx...  

P.S. There is a valid case for getting Pinnacle, however.  With ver 8 they had hardware (3 port firewire card; agere chipset unfortunately...) + software (full Studio 8 )  bundle package selling for the same price as the software itself.  That was making the whole thing quite tempting.

[Jim P]

I'm using version 8 - I think it's 8.5.  I started with version 6 and the analog capture card a few years ago.

The only problem I've ever had with Studio is with the capture - it doesn't matter to me because I like Scenalyzer.  I always edit in AVI and never have sync problems or any other problems with Studio.  Judging by Pinnacle's user forums some people do have problems with it, but not more than you'd expect from any product.

I picked up my firewire card (Belkin) at Walmart for under $30, and it works fine.  Don't let that sway you if you're happy with the Magix program.

Speaking of Walmart, my wife sent me last weekend for bird seed.  I noticed they're carrying Barracuda IV hard drives now, 40 and 80 gig.  Jim

[towtruck]

I am curious as to what software allows you to convert the ATI .vcr file to a .mpeg/2?

[Larry]

http://www.moviecodec.com/thread/91.html

[theduke]

I going to try the pure motion myself. I tried Virtual dub and still not sure if there is an easier way. I trying to restore and clean a video of a program no longer available. The video is on VHS and was taped from a TV show a few years back. Looks like interference and color shifting took place through out.
Great news, I think...I am about to retry with the NVIDIA FX 5700 (256MB) Personal Cinema card and I can input the video using a Panasonic AG-DS850 ( http://www.broadcaststore.com/store/model_detail.cfm?id=13777 ) which I borrowed from work.
I looking for a good cleaning software, any thoughts for a novice?

[ogryzek]

Are you sure that those problems are not due to Macromedia copy protection ?

[AllWeb]

I am using Pinnacle Studio 9, and I had no problem capturing the video from my DV camcorder, nor did I have any problem editing everything, add effects, etc, it was easy.
  HOWEVER, now it's been over 17 ( ! ! ! ) hours that the program has been "rendering" the movie, and it's the second time I started over.  I thought the first time it "hang" itself, but no, it didn't.

Does anyone know why on earth it takes forever to "render" the video?