How or which software will allow me to alter and edit videos? I want to make certain parts of a home video brighter (its too dark), which software gives me that capability? Also is there audio editing softwares?
For avi video, virtualdubmod. For mpg video, Vegas. For audio, Goldwave or Soundforge. These are just my opinions. There are many many pieces of software that will do what you want.
Hi rebootjim, I seem to have all the neccessary software, its only a matter of understanding some of the principles of video and audio editing, encoding etc. For instance DVDSanta is very quick and converts an AVI file into DVD format and burns onto Disk media the fastest I have seen. Does it produce and inferior quality as compared to say taking an AVI file using Procoder and spliting it into 2 files Video (m2p) and audio (m2v), then taking INFOedit or DVDLab and authoring it into DVD files (VOBs) and then using Nero to burn. Also where can I read and understand these principles so I really know what it is that I am doing. Currently I can successfuly burn a DVD to play in my player, but I don't understand why I do certain steps.
Start by going to http://www.videohelp.com At the top left, it explains WHAT IS... DVDSanta (IMHO) is junk, but I'm of the "old school" which believes each step of the process from avi to dvd should be controlled. I don't like programs doing things to my video in the background, waiting for the output, only to find that it's not at all what I expected. Too many things can go wrong, especially with downloaded video. Better to correct at the earliest possible step in the process, and only have to do a project once. As to the "Why"... Videos come in any number of formats, compression schemes (codecs), including audio compressions of various sorts. Just because it says .avi on the end doesn't mean much. We need to find out what's inside that avi. What video compression codec, audio compression codec, framerate, aspect ratio, pixel aspect ratio (sometimes), and maybe a few other bits of info (is it a 2 part video that was joined?) that will help getting a proper output. Gspot is my tool of choice for this. Understand that a video is made up of (at least) two streams. Video and audio. It could also contain multiple audio streams, subtitles, or different language streams. Knowing what the inputs are, and what you NEED for final output determines the whole process. You can't often dump in a half-frame PAL, XviD, avi, with VBR MP3 audio, into something like Santa, and expect to get a nice full-frame, NTSC, mpeg-2, with AC3 CBR audio out of it. It may work, but it will play jerky, the frame could be squashed or stretched, and the audio will almost always be out of sync.
