Be Excellent To Each Other

A mate of mine is trying to pull together a load (581 clips - 4.3GB) of .mod film clips from his holiday into Windows Live Movie maker to edit and then run off a DVD.

It is crashing like fuck and some googling turns up an MS chap saying that it can't really cope with relatively complex projects which is fair enough as it's free innit. What is the hive program of choice for such an endeavour?

Windows 7 64bit with 3GB ram if that helps.

In exchange for help he has given me a cracking cat story which I will relay in the pet thread soonish.

Did the camera come with software? I've found the JVC stuff that came with mine to be the best thing for getting them onto dvd

I use Cyberlinks Power Director.. I believe it's on version 9 now.

When I was looking around, this came out tops in all the reviews I read and it is a pretty cheap option. It does crash on me occasionally but apparently all video editing software does once in a while.

.mod files are just mpgs with different extension. Might be a good idea to rename them so more progs and understand them. If I do video editing I use Womble Mpeg video thingy. It's quite good. Not sure how good it is with that many files though...

Powerdirector... that's the one that came with my camera

Hello viewers. I can't recommend free consumer editing software unless you happen to have a Mac and some money (in which the answer is always Final Cut Express). However I have zapped over a PM to our OP recommending some software he can (purchase at his local software shop - Ed).

Meanwhile I can recommend MPEG Stream Clip to solve all your MPEG woes. It's aces, free, works on PC and Mac and lets you convert and manipulate MPEG's and quite a few other formats. NO COMPUTER USERS SHOULD BE WITHOUT IT.

http://www.squared5.com/

It's aces, I have it installed, use it all the time and even stumped up the 20 or so quid for the Apple MPEG 2 codec (a download from the Apple store).

So if you have camcorder files that are acting up, you can use MPEG Stream Clip to convert the file to something your editing software will play ball with. It can even do things like downscale your video to SD and so on.

So... if, for instance, Power Director didn't always like the MP4s that my camera throws out. I could use this software to convert them into something that Power Director would recognise and like?

Good find that Chinny! I shall be downloading it straight away!

I wondered how long it would be until the mighty chinny would appear to solve video editing woes. HE IS THE KING OF THE VIDEO EDITING.

One of the many reasons I formed the chinnyhill appreciation society.

It is good although there are more elegant solutions than transcoding if you have money to spend. But that software will pretty much convert any MPEG (and quite a few other files) to friendlier formats. For instance because I have Flip4Mac, I was able to take a WMV a client sent me and easily convert it to Quicktime to edit with.

I have a gig booked for next month where I basically have to take myself + my Macbook to a gathering of corporate types who will be shooting on those Flip things to make their own movies and I'll have a couple of hours to edit it together with them. MPEG Streamclip will be essential to quickly get the Flip footage into something Final Cut friendly.

Of course I am speaking of the Mac version but I have no reason to assume the Windows version is any different. It's a small piece of free software that it's worth downloading, "just in case". It'll bail you out of problems when you least expect it and (in my case) when software costing hundreds of pounds has let you down.

When I was speaking to my mate I told him that I post on the same forum as Alan Sugar's illegitimate son who wears the aforementioned crown so answers of great excellence should be forthcoming.

And lo it did come to pass.

If you post it* he will come.

It being a topic about video editing.

So what were the recommendations Chinny? Can you post them here?

As I said before I use Power Director and it does the job.. but if there's something better out there, I would be interested in trying it myself.

Struggling to see the "free" bit there...

Perhaps because such software is actually quite complex and the good stuff tends to cost a lot of money . FCP Express is only 60 quid which is 1.5x a Xbox game for software that is effectively a "lite" version of FCP which costs 10 times as much. There's stuff such as Premiere Elements knocking around for the PC which I can't say I've played with lately but should do the job for around the same money.

You have no idea how many people I see struggling along trying to cobble stuff together with free software or stuff that came bundled with their camcorder. On Tuesday at the end of a meeting with a potential client one of the people asked me if I could help with their camcorder footage as everytime they got halfway through editing it their computer would crash. I get asked this all the time. MPEG StreamClip will solve most issues but if the software is still playing up after that its time to look elsewhere. If you are looking at doing any half serious editing you need to have something like FCP Express otherwise it's like trying to write a book in notepad.

That is my final word.

Never knew there was a 'lite' version. Mind you, I don't really dabble with movies.

You miss my point - you said "free", and then said "money".

T'was a joke.

To be fair if you've got a mac you've probably got iMovieHD for "free" anyway, which certainly seems to do the job on the occasions I've used it.

Thanks for the recommendation, Chinster. That's the sort of thing I've been looking for. Much easier than Power Director.

What's the Sony Ripoff of Final Cut? Is it Vegas?

Edit: Yes.

Old thread is good thread.

I'm getting back into video editing and have been chopping up some footage from my 2010 New York trip. The thing is, the raw footage is in 50hz from the camcorder. Is there any point preserving the original framerate if the resulting videos are only ever going to be viewed on 60hz devices? Youtube, Chromecast, android box, PC, phones... all 60hz. It's not like I'm going to be burning a DVD. If I leave it at 50hz, there's judder and tearing.

I need a Chinny, basically

There's a chubby in Twitter?

Yeah, get Chinny on the case on Twitter. He'll know.

Re PC, this is one of the reasons I use MPC, specifically on PCs connected to TVs - you can configure it to set refresh rate based on frame rate. This makes tv-sourced content (including DVD ISOs) look like live tv and removes 3:2 pulldown judder from 24fps content (including blu ray ISOs). This doesn't help with other applications or smart tv apps though; in particular, it'd be nice if Netflix did similar.

I used Adobe premiere once. I found it good, easy to use and stable.

I use one called VSDC, which is free and works with pretty much any movie type I throw at it.

Though I just tried putting a 4GB 29-minute video of my costume preparation into it and it really didn't like that at all.