PC home video/DVD editing. What's popular?

AJ_Dual

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May 7, 2005
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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.
 

Sigman

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My 17 year old son used Pinnacle Studio (latest version is 10.5) for a couple high school projects...easy to use, transitions, music, adding text, menus, etc...I had an earlier version and when the a newer version came out - he "made" me get it - he liked it that much!

I recently picked up a package/combo of Adobe Photoshop Elments 4.0 and Premiere Elments 2.0 for $69 after rebate - (don't know if the rebate is still good but shop around for sure). For the price it was a heckuva package deal for sure!! Looks good, but haven't done anything with it yet. Lot of bang for the buck!

I think most of the "big name" wares will fulfill your home needs easy enough.

Most of the video editing wares today are all "drag & drop" of the pics, sounds, videos, transitions, etc. into a "timeline". Fairly easy to make a nice presentation!

However, :stupid: :D
 

AJ_Dual

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I remember Adobe Premier from my own college daze way back in the 90's. I remember it being pretty easy too. I thought it would cost more.

I think most of the "big name" wares will fulfill your home needs easy enough.

But I guess people have at least heard of ProShow Gold, and have nothing majorly bad to say about it?

If so, my wife's investment in learning it probably means we should stick with that.

If there's a trial version of Pinnacle or Adobe, I'll download it and see if she likes it better.
 

Kristofg

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Apr 7, 2003
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The free microsoft movie maker for XP does a pretty good job for simple video editing. I've been using it for a few years now and the main complaint is that it has only one timeline (ie. it is not possible to have video over video, only video over still image)
 

alphamicro

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Sep 19, 2003
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Louisiana
Here's a good website to check

In fact, it's the only videocam website I've found that's comparable to the good digital camera websites. Check the forums as there is a lot of info about various software packages. My recollection is that unless you want to spend many hundreds of dollars (or more), there were two roughly $100 packages that were considered to be the best: Sony Vegas (believe there is more than one version, don't recall which is the $100 one) and Adobe Premiere Elements. There are a lot of less expensive alternatives, but that price point seems to be the sweet spot. There is a LOT of useful information there about the whole video editing/authoring/etc. process to be found in the forums.

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/
 
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