I've done quite a bit of amateur stuff myself. I concur that video editing software seems rather sensitive. The two I have played with most are Ulead's Video Studio and Adobe Premier Elements. Similar capability, but on my hardware, I have had better luck with the Ulead product.
Both of these products are capable of editing video and producing timeline based output. This allows you to have several tracks of video, stills, titling and audio tracks to work with. The pro oriented packages tend to give you more tracks to work with and much more in the way of manual tweaking of transitions, animations, etc. To get your feet wet, I would stick with one of these packages. Of the two, I think VideoStudio is easier to work with and more straightforward. The Adobe product is a little fancier interface and slightly less intuitive. So now you have four different choices to look at - I think all of them have a trial version so I would try them all and see what works well on your system and fits into your style. You might also see if any of them handle your particular video output without having to convert it first. -- Best regards, Bruce Sunday, August 26, 2007, 10:09:26 AM, you wrote: GS> William - GS> I'm far from an expert, but I can relate my personal experience. I've GS> tried an earlier version of the Pinnacle product, Adobe's Premier GS> Elements and Sony's Vegas Movie Studio. The latter two are the GS> consumer versions of the more expensive pro products. All three are GS> around $100 US and can usually be found on discount. GS> After a lot of experimentation I've settled on the Movie Studio GS> product. Functionally, it works the best for me, and it performs the GS> best on my hardware. As an added bonus, at work, our Corporate GS> Communications dept. uses it for all of their work so I have a GS> convenient local resource. GS> Now, here's the thing. All of these video programs I've tried seem to GS> be very sensitive to your hardware configuration. So my GS> recommendation is download trial copies from the vendor's web sites GS> and give them a good shaking out on your specific hardware. GS> Oh yeah, buy a couple of great big hard drives. Video eats up space GS> in a way that dwarfs the needs of still images. GS> See you later, gs GS> <http://georgesphotos.net> GS> On 8/26/07, William Robb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Hi, I recently enabled myself with a video camcorder (sadly not a Pentax). I >> am wondering what would be good software to look at for editing video. If >> anyone on list is doing video as well, I would love your suggestions. >> The camera seems to put out a proprietary filetype which must be converted >> to either AVI or MPEG, so I expect I am partially stuck with the >> manufactuers software. >> >> TIA >> >> William Robb >> >> >> -- >> PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List >> [email protected] >> http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net >> -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
