Video Editing Software

[gileraguy]

HI Guys

I have a Core i5 machine running W8 with 8GB ram.

I have a stack of videotape sitting around waiting to be edited into watchable , listenable movies.

My old Dell dimension 3000 was showing its age and even after a ram upgrade and a huge 130GB disc upgrade!
( it crashed trying to run Corel draw video editing software.)

The thing is, I want to get a decent video editor, that is intuitive and "simple" I don't want to do anything too fancy, just produce home movies from the tapes and add background music.

I'm recording on a Panasonic NV-GS 300 (last of the steam powered Mini DV tape cameras, but serviceable and with a good fisheye lens)

I'm looking at a Go Pro in the near future and I want to see if I can make somerthing out of what I have. Nothing too demanding.

Any ideas on software out there?

gileraguy.

[Bushfiva]

Windows Movie Maker is a free download from MS and may be enough for you.

[UniFoxOs]

Got the same problem, only worse now. After the failure of the good old Sony digital tape camcorder I decided to go to memory card - for ease of transfer as much as anything, but also smaller media than tape and no mechanicals to go wrong. Only problem is they are all HD now, and you get a different file format that most software won't use.

I tried WMM (suggested by Bushfiva above). It's pretty basic but does what's required. Only thing is it seemed to only produce Windoze's own format (WMV) for the finished movie. OK for viewing on the PC, or off a network server via a media player, but needs a conversion to make a DVD from it.

Cheers
UFO

STOP PRESS
Had another go with WMM and discovered you can save files as AVI and other formats if you know where to look. Maybe I'll get my holiday videos trtansferred to DVD now!

[gileraguy]

Thanks for the update. I'll give it a go.

Gileraguy

[lomapaseo]

Maybe I'll get my holiday videos trtansferred to DVD now!

Having been through all the twist and turns on this from reels to digital I did the following

Stored all those tiny 8 mm tapes for years and almost never bothered to view one a second time.

then years later

Transfered all my holiday movies to VHS and watched them for a second time (boy did they ever need editing)

then years later

Transferred all those video tapes to DVDs with at least some editing of crap scenes. Only I bothered to watch them as the rest of the family couldn't care less.

then a couple of years later

used my PC to transfer all the DVDs to digital format on the PC where I sorted the files by date. Much easier to find stuff. Still nobody else cared to watch them

Then

Got the bright idea of selecting a few scenes and uploading them to the internet (private or otherwise) and now the whole family can easily watch the few 2-3 min clips of most interest.

Threw out all the reels, tapes, DVDs but kept the PC hard drives (backups)

I wonder what I'll try next

[vulcanised]

Format Factory is a useful utility for changing a large number of formats.

[xtypeman]

Try Power Director 10 or its latest version 11.

[seacue]

Surely I'm revealing myself to be the idiot that I am, but:

What is the recommended way of going from analog video to a computer's digital file?

An "old folks residence" wants to purchase a box for about US$300 which goes from analog VHS to DVD. That sounds like a quick path to obsolescence to me.

Comments, please.

Thank you.

seacue

(And pardon the US spelling.)

[MG23]

One of the VHS to DVD boxes is the cheap and cheerful solution; you'll always be able to rip the MPEG-2 files from the DVD and convert them, but the quality will become progressively worse. You could buy an analogue capture card for a PC, but then you have the complexity of capturing the video and converting it into whatever format you want to store it it.

Personally I copied all my old Hi8 tapes onto MiniDV using my old camcorder's analogue inputs, and then captured that by Firewire. It's a fairly low-compression format so doesn't lose much quality over the originals. I believe most Digital-8 camcorders could do direct analogue to digital conversion onto Firewire when playing 8mm and Hi8 tapes, but I'm not aware of any similar capability for VHS.

[Milo Minderbinder]

I've still not found anything to beat the old Hauppuage PVR250 / 350 series of analog TV cards for capturing video from tape. They were unusual in having hardware real-time MPG2 encoding and decoding chips, which made the whole thing much more efficient - and overall of better quality. If you can find one (they were PCI cards) grab it.
Otherwise you need an TV card or video capture card with either an analog ariel input, or else with S-video / Composite-video inputs which can be fed from the tape drive. Note that synchronisation usually works better if you can input the sound to the capture card, rather than the audio card and directly embed it into the MPG2 stream

[shaky]

Had another go with WMM and discovered you can save files as AVI and other formats if you know where to look.

Give us a clue then.