I’m looking for something cheap or free to use to edit my little Quicktime digital camera vid’s.
The camera is actually for stills (can’t afford a real camcorder yet) but it does a decent job of little video clips. However for the moment I don’t have a method to cut, splice, add tunes…etc to the clips.
As much as I dislike it, Windows Movie Maker comes with Windows XP and is pretty simple to use for basic editing.
Ah, I see, thanks for mentioning that, I wasn’t aware of it in XP.
JC turned me on to TMPGenc which is a nice way to compress Quicktime (.MOV) format into mpeg and it has editting capabilities (start, stop, merge). Another freeware program is xilisoft avi-mpeg converter which actually converts just about any format to mpeg. If we go on group rides and have videos in several formats, I can convert them all to mpeg with this one and then merge them with TMPGenc.
JC is the main man and can tell you how to find anything you need. He’ll probably pop on to this thread later and ask you for more specifics. Windows media encoder will then compress your mpeg by a huge factor into a comparatively small .wmv file.
If you do go for Windows Movie Maker (what I used before I bought a copy of Sony Vegas Movie Studio for $100), make sure you download version 2…it’s far better than version 1 which, I think, comes standard with XP.
Andrew
Oh yeah i forgot to mention that.
Here’s THE THREAD about converting QuickTime MOV files. That thread will explain how to convert the MOV files that your camera makes into AVI or MPEG files that Windows programes can better deal with. Once the video is in AVI or MPEG format you can use Windows Movie Maker (included for free with Windows XP) to edit and then compress to something small.
Microsoft Windows Movie Maker
Windows Movie Maker Tips and Tutorials
Whoops! Bad link there.
Here’s THE THREAD with a correct link (I’m double checking before posting ;))
You can say that again.
It even handles the videos shot with my phone.
Thanks loads guys! 
Another program that I just recently heard about, but haven’t tried yet, is MediaCoder. It’s freeware and open source. Claims to be able to convert to and from many different formats. I’ll have to give it a try when I get a round tuit.
John! Really[post=490134]!![/post]