Video Editing

[martytoo]

Can anyone suggest a decent video editing program? It must be able to handle AVHCD from a HD Camcorder I'll stretch to about £60
I have decent hardware specs.
3.1 GHZ Quad core AMD Phenom 4GB RAM
Windows 7 64 Bit
ATI HD Radeon 4770 with 512 RAM

[Lynnrose]

I am hoping Movieman will see your message as he is the best one for the job

[movieman36]

There are quite a few contenders in the £50 to £100 bracket. I use Adobe Premier for a living (currently CS3 and looking at CS5) which costs nearly £2000 for the master suite so have to declare a slight bias, not necessarily as to features, work flow etc but because of familiarity to the product through many incarnations starting at Premier 6.5

The reason I mention my use of Premier CS is I have also used Premier Elements in various versions (now at 8) and have to declare that for about £75 it will do 80% of what the full CS version does and what it doesn't do you probably would never need (there is still shed loads of stuff in CS I have never used).

I have also used Pinnacle and I was on the review team for Magix. Pinnacle I found to be very resource hungry and slow and Magix I had great difficulty with the interface in general. Having said that I am mentor to a local group of amateur film makers and there is a mix of Pinnacle and Magix users there that like either. The other main contender is Corel who have just released a new version Video Studio Pro X3 which is getting very good reports. I have used quite a few Corel products in the past and always found them to be very good.

So to my recommendations: I would suggest you check out either Premier Elements 8 and Corel VideoStudio Pro X3. They are both a about £20 more than you planned to spend but remember in both you get DVD authoring etc all bundled and are both very versatile and well ahead of the rest, could be an extra £20 well spent.

Just a word about your PC. AVCHD is notorious for demanding a very high specification system, even recent top line machines can struggle with video editing AVCHD files, be warned, the software helps but don't expect to get three or four editing layers running smoothly on your machine.

Good luck, any other questions, happy to answer if I can.

MM

[Lynnrose]

Thanks MM

[martytoo]

Thanks for your helpful suggestions I'm not looking for any really fancy editing just something to cut out the c**p bits and make a halfway decent DVD as the final result.
Most of the video I shoot is for family/holidays etc. but from time to time I'm called upon to Video events for my local Community Association and it would be nice to make things look a bit better.
I do have one super simple method of getting recordings on to a DVD - connect the camcorder to the DVD/HDD Recorder which allows some very basic editing on the Hard Drive not very elegant though.

[movieman36]

When you talk about making things 'look a little better' then just by chopping out the iffy bits will do that. To make a massive difference to your results I have a few suggestions. 1/ Don't move the camera at all unless your following a subject. 2/ Don't zoom in or out when filming. 3/ Take a shot, move to a different position and then take another shot. 4/ Don't shoot everything at eye level, vary the camera position, if shooting kids, shoot at their level etc. 5/ If you HAVE to walk with the camera, get in closer with it set to the wide angle end of the lens for much smoother looking shots 6/ Get big close ups of things, faces, hands doing things etc 7/ Don't forget reverse shots, ie. If there is a band playing, try to get the view from the band looking out to the audience for example 8/ If you have people talking to camera and are not using a separate microphone get in close. An easy way to make everything you shoot look 1000% better, put the camera on a tripod.

When editing spend at least as much time on the sound as you do on the visuals.

Easy.

[martytoo]

Hi Movie Man thanks for your tips I already do most of what you suggest. The nature of certain events I've had to Video means i can't always get the ideal position I would like, plus there's the inevitable situation where somebody blindly walks in front of the camera.
I've now solved my editing issues by purchasing Corel Digital Studio 2010 which satisfies my needs particularly it can edit HD recordings without the quality loss involved in converting them to an alternate format or copying them to an external HDD recorder.
The full price of £59 was within my budget, however at half this price it was a bargain.

[Angelstardust]

Is it capable of converting MOV files to a more general format?