Editing Home Videos

In the capturing section I said you were going to be capturing the footage in the DV/AVI format. You will now take that file and edit it, trim it, add transitions, add special effects and add a music soundtrack with video editing software.

Hopefully you will be creating something interesting. Quite often you will tape a lot of footage of an event. Rather than showing an hour long movie that will bore most people to tears you can take bits and pieces of the event and add some snazzy music to the soundtrack.

An important take away is to limit the length of your final movie to less than 1 hour. Anything longer than that and you will need to sacrifice quality to fit it onto a DVD. Depending on the types of action and the quality of the source you can get away with almost two hours on a DVD.

Editing Software

Without hesitation I highly recommend Sony Vegas Studio. There are other products out there that get more press and advertising **cough** Pinnacle Systems **cough**.

Sony Vegas Studio simply works as advertised and has NEVER crashed on me. The complaints about bugs and crashes are almost non-existent on the Sony Support Forums

If you still insist on considering other software packages do some research at:

If you see lots of pleas for help or complaints about bugs then that should be a clue to forget about that piece of software.

Other Choices:

Adobe Premiere Elements

I have read a lot of favorable reviews for Adobe Premiere Elements. I found the workspace of Adobe Premiere Elements to be a little confusing even though I am very familiar with Adobe Photoshop.

Windows Movie Maker 2
I actually like this product, especially the price. It is included with Windows XP Home. The major shortcoming of this product are the lack of output format options and overall flexibility.

Ulead VideoStudio 9
I tried this product and quite frankly did not care for it. Ulead tends to make everything very “wizard” based. Most users quickly outgrow this. This also tends to make the program less flexible. I have also questioned the quality of Ulead products in regards to stability.

I have Ulead DVD Moviefactory and thinks it’s quite good for reasons I discuss in the authoring section.

Pinnacle Systems
Honestly stay away.

Your done Editing…now what ?

You’re working on your AVI file but guess what ? DVD’s files require files to be in the MPEG2 format. At some point you need to convert your AVI file into a MPEG2 file. The process of converting the file format is called encoding. Where you do this in your development process depends on the software you have.

In my case I save my edited movie as an AVI. I then open the file in Ulead DVDMovieFactory to create the DVD menu system. Once I am done creating the menu system I have DVDMovieFactory encode the AVI into an MPEG2.

I also could have encoded my movie to MPEG2 in my editing software and then imported the MPEG2 into DVDMovieFactory. The reason I do it the other way is that DVDMovieFactory gives me a lot more control over the encoding process.

2 Comments »

  1. Ed Silva said,

    April 25, 2008 @ 12:03 am

    Hi, I’m new on the home video stuff.
    I’m trying to create some videos about gps units and then upload them to youtube.
    I just found out that my camcorder Canon DC100 won’t do the job.
    At this time I don’t want to spend much money in a new camcorder. Would you recommend a webcam? or which camcorder would you recommend me?

    Thanks,

    Ed Silva.

  2. webmaster said,

    April 25, 2008 @ 7:46 am

    I would consider the Flipcam or a digital camera with video capabilities like the Casio Exilim series.

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