video editing program?

Off-topic
1

Just wondered if there were any easy to use video editing programs on the net? I want to do some simple stuff with the video clips I take with my digital camera.

thanks

2

If you’ve got Windows XP the best bet to try first would be Windows Movie Maker. It’s a freebie in Windows XP. It’s not available for, and won’t run on, previous versions of Windows. It’s an XP only kind of thing.

Windows Movie Maker site at Microsoft
Download Windows Movie Maker
Help site and forum for Windows Movie Maker

3

I like Windows Movie Maker, but I have problems with it freezing at bad times… Otherwise it works for what I use it for.

4

Ok, I’ve downloaded the Movie Maker and will put it to work shortly. Thanks for your help, John.

5

For me, it freezes when I’m playing one clip (that’s not in the storyboard/timeline) and then click on another clip without stopping it. Also, when importing files and opening projects I’ve found that I can’t do anything else on the computer until it’s finished or it will freeze.

Andrew

6

you could buy a mac and get iMovie. YEAH GO MAC!!

7

Or you could buy a mac and get finalcut. YEAH GO FINALCUT!

I heart it. it’s so easy to do so much cool stuff!

8

yeah but she wants a really easyone I have finalcut pro but when i do a quick simle movie i use iMovie

9

For simple graphical things I just use flash. Often in combination with trimming the .avi’s (that my camera makes) inside quicktime-pro.
For example in this movie that I made last weekend.

Just web quality. You can go beyond that. On TV/movie/media tradeshows I saw that some TV channels even use flash for example in those daily wheater forcast animations. It’s not an easy tool. But I think the basics (layers, timeline) are easy (and worth) to learn.

I can’t say wheter it’s the appropiate tool for you, as I don’t exactly know what you want to do, and I don’t have much experience with other tools.

I do have seen a demo by Apple on iMovie with examples from the Matrix and Mtv. Far beyond my needs, though I have customers who are using it for making video-clips for bands. So I can confirm that (not only for the budget) iMovie is a amazing good tool worth buying a new computer for (like suggested by brockfisher05).

10

Humm, yeah well so far I can’t even get Movie Maker to import my clips that I have saved on the computer.

I simply want to cut out some bits of video clips that are boring and put together an number of clips to make a longer video that I can view on my computer.

At this point I’m still open to other suggestions for simple video editing programs that can be utilized on a PC.

11

What file type are your clips?

Did you download Windows Movie Maker 2 (not 1)? It’s quite a bit better.

WMM2 should handle .wmv’s and .avi’s no worries.

Andrew

12

I think perhaps file type is my problem Andrew. It looks like they are downloading off of my camera in Quicktime format…? That is sort or weird. So I think I need to download them with the Windows Media player probably to get the file type I need.

Also when I went to name the clips, the propeties then just list the file type as ‘file’. What’s with that?

And yes its Movie Maker 2 I downloaded as per John’s earlier suggestion.

thanks

13

didn’t u get any basic editing software that came with the camera?
can u download some from their website?
do they have an FAQ about editing video clips taken with that camera?

14

Ah, QuickTime format is a pain on a PC. QuickTime is much more of a Mac thing.

You’ll need to convert the QuickTime file to either an AVI or MPEG file so Windows Movie Maker can read them. Here’s a thread that explains how to do that: Converting from MOV to MPEG or AVI. On page 2 of that thread we kind of determined that installing QuickTime Alternative may give Windows Media Encoder (and possibly Windows Movie Maker) the ability to read simple MOV files. You can give that option a try.