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20080307 Friday March 07, 2008

Free Simple To Use Video Editing Software?

Duncan has a book report presentation on Monday. One of the options is to create a video rather than speak directly to his class. He'd like to do that.

Last night with the help of an iSight camera attached to my Powerbook, QuickTime Broadcaster and the excellent instructions on the O'Reilly macdevcenter.com web site, we worked out how to capture the video in MPEG 4 format.

That's fine, but there are some bits that we'd now like to remove. I'd also like to add initial titles and if possible, fade-out / fade-in between "scenes".

If you haven't realized by now, all of this is new to me. If I had the luxury of more time, I'd be happy to use something like the Digital Video For Dummies and try a few experiments. For now, I'm looking for free, simple to use software that will make these tasks easy and quick.

I copied the video over to my Ubuntu system and loaded up Avidemux and worked with their wiki and was able to successfully cut out some of the pieces that we didn't want, but due to my inexperience, it was a bit of a hit and miss affair. I still haven't worked out how to do the other things.

Anybody got any recommendations for free, easy to use alternatives? For Windows Xp, Mac OS X Tiger or Ubuntu Hardy.

I thought there would be a time when I'd have trouble helping my son with his homework, but I didn't expect it to be while he was still in fourth grade.

Any pointers would be very much appreciated.

Thanks.

[]

( Mar 07 2008, 11:16:10 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [14]

Comments:

iMovie '08 is the only video editing software I've used that I've been able to edit a movie from start to finish w/out resorting to a "dummies" book. It has a very limited feature set, but you can do titles and a transitions.

Posted by Red Wagner on March 07, 2008 at 11:37 AM PST #

I can only link to <a href="http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2007/12/03/the-linux-video-editor-situation/">this</A> , <a href="http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2008/01/20/video-editor-mockup/">this</a>, and <a href="http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2008/01/18/vindication/">this</a> [bitter] blog posts. The truth is, there is no good home-video solution for Linux. If you read the comments on these blog posts two major video Linux devs even agree with these claims.

If your camera is SD, I would suggest Kino or KDEnLive. If you have an HD camera and/or if you are after the ease of use of iMovie, then indeed get yourself a Mac or a PC to do the job properly.

Posted by Eugenia on March 07, 2008 at 12:35 PM PST #

Thanks Red and Eugenia! As my wife has iMovie
on her iBook, we are going to try to generate
what we want with that. It's not the very latest
version, but it should hopefully be able to
handle the simple things we want to do.

Posted by Rich Burridge on March 07, 2008 at 02:49 PM PST #

Personally, I prefer the older version of iMovie than iMovie 08. There is a lot of disheartened users out there for the new iMovie 08 because it was re-written from scratch and a LOT of features were removed along with it. It is a dubbed down version of previous versions (there is no iDVD integration anymore, there is no timeline, etc etc etc). If you have iMovie '06, you are in business. You only need iMovie 08 if you have an AVCHD camera. Any other, tape-based, camera will work with iMovie 06 perfectly.

Posted by Eugenia on March 07, 2008 at 03:30 PM PST #

Well I had to look at a YouTube video:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=EH-3r6weMXU
in order to work out how to drag the title
but I now know how to do that and transitions.
I haven't tried editing individual frame yet,
but it looks like iMovie will be perfect for what
we what.

Woohoo!

Posted by Rich Burridge on March 07, 2008 at 03:35 PM PST #

@Rich: Glad you got it working!

@Eugenia: I just wanted to comment, I'd seen there was a lot of outrage about the missing features for the '08 rewrite, but as a *complete* video newb I'd never really been able to do even basic editing on any platform w/out tutorials before '08. I've tried iMove '06, Kino, AviDemux, Cineleramabamawhateva and a couple others.

I've also done five videos for my startup video blog and haven't been hampered by the "missing" features in anyway. I'm sure I'll run into them eventually, and I'm sure if I had come to rely on these features I'd be annoyed that they were gone, but for now I'm quite happy.

If you're new to editing, I don't think there's a better video editor than iMovie '08. I was naively disappointed that Final Cut Pro didn't have a similar interface.

Posted by Red on March 07, 2008 at 04:24 PM PST #

FCP can not have such an interface. It requires every bit of in-depth editing by professionals.

As for iMovie 08, yes, if you are a complete newbie, it will help you out. But people were really angry because they were already using iMovie 06 that had many more features, and then when they "upgraded" they could not do what they wanted to do. In fact, EVEN if you are using iMovie 08, after about a month, it will be an inadequate solution even for the "complete newbie". Because in a month's time, he won't be a complete newbie anymore, and he would need new features. Features that iMovie 06 can offer, and 08 can't.

I am personally using Sony Vegas Pro on Windows for my video editing needs (I started off with iMovie 05 on my PowerMac). I am serious about editing and color grading, and I've been very happy with Vegas so far (not that it can't be better of course). Vegas is not the easiest app to use, but from the moment you "get it", it becomes really powerful. It is also the cheapest solution in the Win/Mac market to support 24p editing.

Posted by Eugenia on March 07, 2008 at 05:13 PM PST #

Hi Rich,

I have a suggestion here but I guess it's a bit long and tedious procedure. First, simply convert the MP4 format you have into AVI.. now you can edit your movie through the movie maker built in your Win XP. From there, you can easily add initial titles and if possible, fade-out / fade-in between "scenes".

For converting your MP4 to AVI you mat try this application: http://www.any-video-converter.com/products/for_video_free/

I hope this will to the trick. Goodluck Rich!

Bill

Posted by bill on March 07, 2008 at 05:26 PM PST #

Hi bill. Thanks for the suggestion. For now
I've just gone with iMovie and it's all done.
I also used iDVD to burn a DVD straight from the
iMovie project. It was trivial to put a copy
of the book cover as the initial image that gets
shown when the DVD is inserted.

These two tools met my needs perfectly. Now the
pressure is off, I'm going to spend more time
learning them in detail.

I'm not sure I'm inspired enough yet to make my
own video podcasts, but I'm certainly closer then
I was a day ago.

Posted by Rich Burridge on March 07, 2008 at 06:35 PM PST #

Hi, I'm Richard,

I am programming a little Free and Open Source Video Editing Software for Linux, maybe you want to give it a try one day.

http://www.openmovieeditor.org/

Cheers
-Richard
:-)

Posted by Richard on March 08, 2008 at 11:23 AM PST #

Microsoft Movie Maker is free for XP:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/moviemaker2.mspx

It is not up to par with the iMovie but did I mention it is free? :)

For quick video editing I found that imovie and moviemaker are fine. Longer editing is definitely better with something like Vegas (but that is not free).

Posted by Alexei Rodriguez on March 08, 2008 at 06:58 PM PST #

Movie Maker comes free with Windows XP Professional. Though it's free it's not open source. Sometimes for productivity one should be ready to work in any OS. I'm giving Open Movie Editor a try right now. I, ll be posting things I'll find with it. :-)

Posted by bill on March 08, 2008 at 08:50 PM PST #

For MacOS originally, now also Windows, MPEG
StreamClip is free & great. www.squared5.com
It's excellent for editing MPEG-2 and is supposed
to handle MPEG-4, though I've not tried that.

Posted by rockmelon on March 09, 2008 at 04:10 PM PDT #

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