First Time Editing Video

Last night I took some video of my daughter climbing into her high chair. We have a small handheld video camera that writes to a mini DVD we use to record those special moments. Afterwards, I wanted to chop the video up and add some music overlays to it. I have Windows Vista with Media Center on it on one of my computers so I decided to fire up Windows Movie Maker and see what I could make.My experience was not a good one. The first problem was that my DVD video camera cannot be read from unless the DVD is finalized. I had to waste about 15 minutes of video on a rather expensive medium. I didn’t mind though because the video I got was pretty good. Then I started working with the video files. They were recorded in .VOB and it took me about 30 minutes to figure out it was really MPEG-2 and all I had to do was change the file extension to be able to work with it in Movie Maker.

So I imported the video and started chopping. Now the crappy thing about this was that the MPEG was messed up so the last 10 minutes of the video wasn’t usable. Instead of showing it as 10 minutes long, Movie Maker (and everything else for that matter) thought it was 6 hours long. So much for that segment.

Now that I only had about 15 minutes of usable video out of the entire 25 minutes, I had to choose carefully. However, each time I started chopping a segment it would reset the video place so all the segments started at the same place as the first cut. In order to get a 5 minute video clip of what I wanted, I had to reimport the main file (226 MB) several times. I would cut the video at my start point, which would create a new clip in Movie Maker. Then I had to delete the original so the new clip wouldn’t default back to the beginning of the video. Then I had to split the new file again at the stop point, and then delete the ending clip (the new one created from the second clip). Finally, I had to rename the usable clip so it wouldn’t get overwritten when I reimported the original file for another clip.

Windows Movie Maker wasn’t bad after that (I am going to try again and hopefully it was just this file). It was pretty easy to import music, add transitions and effects, and work with the timeline and storyboard.

However, I would like to find some reasonably priced software that may be able to work with more formats and give me a little more control over my video editing. The first thing that comes to mind is Quicktime Pro, but I’m not sure if that’s what I need or not. I may get into podcasting as well, so something that would allow me to do that might be nice as well.

Please leave me some comments with recommendations on software, editing techniques, and anything else I may need to know. Thanks!

BTW… My video is available on YouTube at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv0r0kVfYVw