Video Editing Software

[guitar814]

I just got a Mini DV camcorder and want to know what is the best software for video editing.

The videos are huge. How can I convert/compress them without losing quality?

Can I make a VCD or something similar to play on my DVD player of my home movies?

Thanks

[scott_hedrick]

I use Adobe Premiere for capturing videos through various sources (from camcorders, cameras, to my TV), editing videos (mainly compositing work, for graphics and effects), and finally compressing and output to file, video, TV or any other destination I can think of.

Premiere can handle VERY large videos (I have successfully used it with over 55GB of uncompressed footage) and has support for many output codecs, including AVI (with various codecs), Real player (with various compression options), Quick time (with any QT compatible codec) and any other codec you can find for it (plenty on the web) so can get the perfect compromise of quality and size to suit you in any format.

On the downside, premiere does have a steep learning curve, with more options and tools than even photoshop has!

Hope that helps,

Scott

EDIT: Typos

[shn]

Originally posted by guitar814@23 July 2003 - 09:15
I just got a Mini DV camcorder and want to know what is the best software for video editing.

The videos are huge. How can I convert/compress them without losing quality?

Can I make a VCD or something similar to play on my DVD player of my home movies?

Thanks
Hope you have a lot of patience. Because its gonna take a while to do all that compression and converting no matter what software your using.

Good luck.

[gadfly]

I too use Premier 6.5. It has an MPEG plugin so you can export your movie in VCD or SVCD form then burn it - I use Nero . Nero even provides the option of putting a number of smaller "movies" on one CD and creating a menu.

If I'm doing something where the quality is important I will export as an AVI file and then use DVD2SVCD and TMPENc to do the encoding but the process takes longer.

As was mentioned Premiere does have a steep learning curve (I began with ULead Media Pro - then in a few months 'moved up') but you can get lots of excellent books for support - something I'd REALLY recommend.


Second - check out some of the sites geared to video editing - Doom9 and VCDHelp.com - both sites are exellent sources of information, guides, and links to handy freeware.

Good luck

Gadfly