Video editing/recording software

[Peter McCoy]

Does anybody know any programs that let me record footage by connecting my VCR up to my PC and/or edit the footage together with music and effects?

[ReaperFett]

It costs a lot of money IIRC, but couldnt say a name.


Editing the sound? believe RealPlayer have something for that, I had to use it last Semester.


EDIT - Adobe Premiere

[Morgan Evanar]

PM Viscera, he knows a lot more about this than I do.

You do need a capture card though.

[Darth Viscera]

It's pretty much impossible to do it right in that capture cards can NEVER be correctly color calibrated, so your digitized footage will come out a) too bright b) too dark c) unsaturated d) supersaturated and e) ALL OF THE ABOVE!, the quality will be crap, and your resulting footage will not meet your expectations. There will be much frustration. Also, VHS quality is very bad, and the quality will only get worse when you digitize it and watch it on a computer monitor.

I say to you as I said to others who have attempted to do novice video capturing, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. You have before you an ordeal of the most grievous kind. You have before you many, many months of struggle and suffering.

Now, if you are undaunted by this warning of impending doom, then I can give you some recommendations and get you started.

P.S. Adobe Premiere is "the sucks" as I have noticed some 1377 people say. Pinnacle Studio 8 is much easier to use, and has better effects to apply. I never figured out how to use Premiere anyway, and I never noticed any interesting effects in it when I was trying to use it.

[Dark Lord Dyzm]

P.M. Me!

Well anyway, if you have the money, use the AVID systems.
There is another one, simpler, but I can't recall name. Still cost 100 something bucks.

If you don't have the money, Adobe After Effects is a good program. It basically the next step up from Adobe Premier.
Still cost a bit, but I liked using it in College.

Edit: To the above statement, the reason Adobe Premiere sucks is because it is designed to be used by multiple PC's with dozens of differrent configurations.
Anything better Premiere and then you will have to start buying things to get it to work.

After Effects runs like Premiere, and it is on the level of Final Cut Pro which.

[Darth Viscera]

Don't use the AVID systems! Use Virtualdub 1.51 to capture through composite on a Hauppauge WinTV Radio capture card in Huffyuv at a resolution of 768x576, your master file will take up about 600 megs/minute, make sure you have a fast hard drive and enable full directdraw accelaration in Vdub capture so you can cut the CPU requirements in half and avoid dropped frames. Drop the master file into Studio 8, add whatever effect you want (my favorite is sepia so that it looks like a Charlie Chaplin movie), then process, or use ACD Videomagic if you're trying to make a music video, very easy to use there.

Adobe After Effects! He's not a bloody balloon!

[Dark Lord Dyzm]

Balloon? No Idea what the reference is...

Damn, I wish I actually bothered to learn what our system uses.

But lets get reasonable, I don't believe, like most of us Poor Teenagers, Peter has the money for all the programs and Hardware. Here is what I would do using my Video Crap Capture Card. I would use a S-Video wire, it has crappy capture, but then its still better then using a, I believe, a BCN. (or is it BNC... Bah, mind is dying.) Most current decent and low priced VCR's now days have them. If possible, transfer video to a digital camera. You will loose some info... curse that Waveform... but capturing from a digital camera with firewire plug-ins will be hella alot easier for most basic programs. Composite is good, but you have to have a good capture card with you. <Basic!>

(The program I thinking about, I remember, IFinish)

[Darth Viscera]

He's not a balloon to be filled with hot air!

WinTV Radio-$40
Or if you're counting in british currency, that's probably about 25 lbs. and a few ounces.

Dyzm, 99% of VCRs out there do not have a S-Video video out port. Those are only for SVHS machines, TVs, cable boxes, digital satellites, etc. You're probably referring to the coax when you talk about BNC, which is BAD advice. Composite carries a better signal than coax by far.

If possible, yes, transfer video to a digital camera which has analog in ports so the camera will do the analog-to-digital conversion and firewire the resulting thing out to your computer, but I doubt Peter has that.

Pretty much all capture cards sold in the last few years have composite in.

You'll need to connect a Y-adapter (http://www.radioshack.com/product.asp?catalog%5Fname=CTLG&category%5Fname=CTLG%5F007%5F002%5F001%5F002&product%5Fid=274%2D879) to the back of the WinTV Radio and then connect the white and red composite plugs to the back of it, the part of the Y-adapter that has two inputs, that way you'll get a stereo signal into the capture card. Better yet, connect the Y-adapter to the line-in on your sound card instead, that way you'll get 48khz audio instead of 44khz, which sounds deficient.

Install Koepi's BT8x8 drivers on top of the drivers that come with the card, because Koepi is a wonderful programmer who provides us all with universal drivers, and he appreciates it when you download his fabulous driver, being that he's a German and all. You know, Fräünhöfër institute and all that.

IFInish? sounds fishy, i never heard doom9 talk about that program. The only programs he should need are AVISynth 2.08, Virtualdub 1.51, the Huffyuv codec, and Pinnacle Studio 8.

[ReaperFett]

Premiere was fine when I used it, which is a better reccomendation than anyone who says "the sucks" ;)

[Dark Lord Dyzm]

IFinish is a big program. The hardware/software set up is confusing. When school starts again for me in the fall. I'll take a picture. Simpler for me.

About the VHS, I do believe that at least half of Sony's normal VHS, not SVHS, do have a S-Video plug. All the ones at Costco have them anyways.


Composite carries a better signal than coax by far
I think I am getting my terms crossed, tomarrow I'll look for my old school binder and go through my test papers. Give my brain a jumpstart back into all this.

[Darth Viscera]

Peter, the absolute best place to get info on the kind of stuff you're talking about is doom9.net.

And you won't find anyone there getting caught dead using Premiere.

[ReaperFett]

THat's because they're all experienced. Doesn't mean it is a good starter program. Photoshop was so confusing in was rubbish until I had spent time using PSP.

[imported_Marcus]

Premiere a good starting program?!?!?!?!

WTF??????????????

NO! NO! NO! It's the bartard of all Adobe programs for complexity, and given Photoshop is complex, that's saying something. Premiere drove me bloody insane.

You want ease of use, Final Cut Pro is up there. Yes you need to go Mac, but it's a hell load easier than Premiere ever was or could be.

[ReaperFett]

NO! NO! NO! It's the bartard of all Adobe programs for complexity
Then I must be the king of footage editing! :D

I just used the tutorial, made a simple one and expanded on it, and I understood it, in a one hour lesson.

[Droo]

Urgh. VHS quality video editing. :x

[Peter McCoy]

Crisis averted :)

I've figured it out now.

I've finally got my Digital Camcorder working on my PC - turns out theres an i.Link connection on the BACK of my PC beneath the USB ports. So now I'm able to record some nonsense and edit around with it.

I'll also be able to record from my Video/DVD player onto the camera and then transfer it to my PC. Time to have some fun. Yay me! :)

Not bad, considering I got the camera last September :p

[Darth Viscera]

Originally posted by Marcus
Premiere a good starting program?!?!?!?!

WTF??????????????

NO! NO! NO! It's the bastard of all Adobe programs for complexity, and given Photoshop is complex, that's saying something. Premiere drove me bloody insane.

You want ease of use, Final Cut Pro is up there. Yes you need to go Mac, but it's a hell load easier than Premiere ever was or could be.

Marcus speaks the truth big-time.

Pete, I still recommend Pinnacle Studio 8 for drop-dead simple video effects. It's basically drag and drop. And if you want to create a music video, ACD Videomagic 5 is one-click simple.

[Morgan Evanar]

Premiere a good starting program?!?!?!?!

WTF??????????????

NO! NO! NO! It's the bartard of all Adobe programs for complexity, and given Photoshop is complex, that's saying something. Premiere drove me bloody insane. anyone and everyone who edits video says this.

[Darth Viscera]

I used it for light video editing way back when, and some of you may recall my early crawls which were done partly with premiere and my take on turning Monty Python into a charlie chaplin movie, but the program is very unwieldy and unstable and difficult to use, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you find a feature that you absolutely need in Premiere and can't find in any other program.

[Dark Lord Dyzm]

We had to take primere in the basic. Yes, it is crap, but it easy to understand if you read the directions.

Final Cut Pro is a good program, used it back in High School.
And like I said before, it is alot like Adobe After Effects.

Note: Can anyone host a small video clip I made back in College? Only a couple of megs. That way, I can show you how easy it is to through something together in Ifinish/After Effects.