The title says it all.
Over the past two years, my wife and I have had two sets of twin girls eleven months apart. We now have thousands of photos and a couple of hours of Mini-DV video we need to start editing and compiling onto DVD, but we were waiting for a PC that could handle DVD burning and video editing. All the kids mean we've got some tax deductions, and had a nice tax refund coming.
So we've finaly replaced our clunky six year old PIII 850Mhz for a nice new Dell P4 3.0 Ghz with 3GB RAM, 19" DVI LCD monitor, 256Mb ATI Radeon video card, and all the fixings. (To afford the RAM and the big DVI LCD, we skimped on the HDD, it's only 160 Gb but we're just going to add a second 250 Gb 7200 rpm SATA, or larger when we see one on sale for video and pics. We'll just let Windows, software, and drivers sit on the "small" 160 HDD...)
My wife has been messing with the trial edition of ProShow Gold, and has been making some practice slide shows set to music, but I want to know if anyone has opinions on what's the best/most popular home video editing suite before she gets too invested in ProShow Gold if it's not the best.
I've heard Pinnacle mentioned a lot, and know it's under $100 which is in the ball park price of ProShow.
We just need to make video chapters, some cute menus with photo backdrops or faded looped video backgrounds, and DVD slide shows of all our JPEG still images on DVD and set it all to music.
Ease of use is probably more important than lots of high-end features or plug-in effects.
Thanks.
Over the past two years, my wife and I have had two sets of twin girls eleven months apart. We now have thousands of photos and a couple of hours of Mini-DV video we need to start editing and compiling onto DVD, but we were waiting for a PC that could handle DVD burning and video editing. All the kids mean we've got some tax deductions, and had a nice tax refund coming.
So we've finaly replaced our clunky six year old PIII 850Mhz for a nice new Dell P4 3.0 Ghz with 3GB RAM, 19" DVI LCD monitor, 256Mb ATI Radeon video card, and all the fixings. (To afford the RAM and the big DVI LCD, we skimped on the HDD, it's only 160 Gb but we're just going to add a second 250 Gb 7200 rpm SATA, or larger when we see one on sale for video and pics. We'll just let Windows, software, and drivers sit on the "small" 160 HDD...)
My wife has been messing with the trial edition of ProShow Gold, and has been making some practice slide shows set to music, but I want to know if anyone has opinions on what's the best/most popular home video editing suite before she gets too invested in ProShow Gold if it's not the best.
I've heard Pinnacle mentioned a lot, and know it's under $100 which is in the ball park price of ProShow.
We just need to make video chapters, some cute menus with photo backdrops or faded looped video backgrounds, and DVD slide shows of all our JPEG still images on DVD and set it all to music.
Ease of use is probably more important than lots of high-end features or plug-in effects.
Thanks.