Simple video editing

[kinetica]

Hello all,

With Xara's ability to create really interesting and decorative headings, I was thinking of making some family movies. However, I am fairly rubbish at pointing the camera so I want to cut the rubbish out, insert some headings or titles created in Xara and maybe have some music or narrative over the top. Does anybody know of any simple free software that will allow me to do this? My camera saves video files as AVI, although I would prefer to compress my final projects as MPEG files.

I have Windows Movie Maker and I was wondering if there was anything else that just wasn't so, well, Microsoft.

Many thanks in advance.

[steve.ledger]

AVI is just a container, there's a very good chance that your camera is already compressing the AVI video data to MPEG or H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10) if a newer camera.

I don't know of any freeware which is powerful enough to do the entire job you're looking at.
I have Camtasia and Sony Vegas, both of which have their strengths and weaknesses.
Often, video editing can be a black art - it's very time consuming too.

[jyoung]

If you want "free" then stick with ms movie maker. It works pretty good. For not too expensive, I use cyberlink power director.

[kinetica]

Thank you both. I will do what I can with WMM. The one thing I can't figure out (and indeed it may not be possible) is how to overlay a transparent image onto a section of movie. Is this possible? I can add titles to the beginning and the end of a movie, but I actually want some titles inside the movie. At the moment I'm doing it with images created in Xara inserted into gaps I create in the movie, but I would prefer them to be transparently overlaid without a break in the movie, if you see what I mean.

[covoxer]

It may be worth to take a look at the Virtual Dub.

[93i]

if you have access to a linux box, have a look at:

http://www.heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php

otherwise i would advice you to think about getting magix video deluxe, it starts at EUR 65 and is really high quality video editing program. so you get a proffessional solution for the price of one car refill, thats not a bad deal

[kinetica]

Thanks for the tip covoxer. However after reading the blurb VirtualDub looks like it is for technical people (which I am not) and anyway it isn't stable for Vista or 64bit which is what I use.

Thank you for your tip, 93i. I don't know anything about linux, so that closes that door! Regarding magix video deluxe, I understand that it's not that expensive, but I'm simply not looking for a professional video solution, simply some home movies. However, if I find that WMM is hampering my creative outpourings, then I will certainly give that a go!

Thank you both