video production

Hi everybody
Could anybody recommend a good program for making and editing videos! It doesn’t have to be too advanced just enough to make something smart with split screens and video inserts etc. It also must be cheap and easy to use! Can anybody suggest something?

someone mentioned this once. never tried. but happy to share the link:

Hello,

I’m not an expert on video production software, but the only one that i have used and could suggest would be:

Adobe Premiere (http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/main.html)

I used this program to edit a wedding video and create a commercial/advertisement. I’m very familiar with the Adobe interface (using Photoshop and Illustrator), so naturally, I was able to fiddle around with the interface of Premiere and learn the basics in less than a week.

Try it out, and btw, you’ll definitely need a decent computer to run the program. You don’t need the best, but like using most multimedia software, it’ll take a lot of juice.

Enjoy!

I would highly recommend Windows Movie Maker XP if you are wanting something simple to use (you must be running XP to be able to use this app). You can download free from the MS site. You can do suprisingly a lot with this little app (and this is coming from a recent switcher to Mac… I hate most windows stuff). The greatest feature is the ability to capture video into .WMV format on the fly, and then save the edited video into .WMV (for presenting on a computer) without more processing. The latest windows codecs are actually excellent.

Also, I’ve built PC editing systems running Premiere and all I can say is that they are such a pain in the a**! Granted, this is back with Premiere 5.1, I hear Premiere Pro is supposed to be much better (though it suppiciously looks a lot like Final Cut Pro now…)

If you have a Mac, try out the latest iMovie, or use Final Cut Pro. Both are suprisingly easy. (btw, iMovie roughly equates to Windows Movie Maker, though I think they both have their strengths/weaknesses)

You should also work “backwords” from what format you want this video to be in… are you looking to have something that is playable on a computer screen or via the web? are you looking to burn a CDROM or a DVD? or are you printing to tape? This may help you narrow down a lot of options…

hope this helps…

if you have a mac, I would recommend Final Cut Express. That should have plenty of capabilities for what you’re looking for.

Any free video software will be very limited, but if you have time, worth trying out anyways. It comes down to how much that split screen is going to be worth to you and more importantly, what kind of output format and quality you will need.