Hi All, I'm new to the editing video world but recently got into it after I successfully created a wedding video using a computer lab at MIT - apple - imovie and final cut pro. Wanted to know if anyone has any suggestions on software and pc system. I would like to stick to the windows OS. My primary purpose is to be able to edit videos from minidv to mpeg 1 or 2 then burn onto a cd. I would also like to be able to insert text into the video as well. Any suggestion would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Get firewire card to your PC, transfer movies in "raw" format to your HDD, add texts and other stuff while in "raw" format, preferrably -- if possible -- by adding stuff (texts, effects and such) using Adobe Premiere (helluva expensive, but the best) and saving to non-lossy format (Huffyuv codec, can download it from our site -- it's free). This WILL take gigabytes of free space, but HDDs are cheap nowadays anyway Then, if you wish to encode to MPEG-1/VideoCD, I recommend using TMPGEnc which is free for MPEG-1 use and produces extremely good quality MPEG-1 video. If you go to VCD format, you can then spend yet another 3-4 days of learning how to make neat menus, chapters and stuff to your VCD with VCDEasy (http://www.vcdeasy.org/) and burn it to CD. I you don't want to bother with menus, simply burn the ready MPEG-1 to VCD by using Nero. If you wish to go to MPEG-2/SVCD(or DVD-R) route and money is not really an issue for you, I recommend getting CCE 2.50 SP ($1995) for encoding. It is simply the best MPEG-2 encoder in terms of quality. Second best is TMPGEnc -- the non-limited version of TMPGEnc costs mere $48 and produces almost as nice video as CCE. And for SVCD authoring, same applies as for VCD -- VCDEasy allows doing nice SVCD menus and stuff and if you prefer not to have anything "c00l", simply burn the MPEG-2 using Nero (guides for VCD/SVCD and Nero are available in our article section). For DVD-R authoring, there are several choices -- IFOEdit is the free one and then there are tons of commercial tools, more or less good ones. Our DVD-R forums can assist you with this.
