Video Editing

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RPGillespie

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Does anybody know of some good (preferably free) video editing software? I have used Adobe Premiere 6.0 and I absolutely love it, but it is >$600... Windows Movie Maker on the other hand completly sucks, and I'm still looking around. It would be beneficial if the software had the ability to reverse a clip and have the "layers" timeline system (like Adobe Premiere) but anything is better than WMM.

-RPGillespie
 
Yes and no.

Virtualdub is great video editing software and it's free. But it's also rather simple, linear editor. Meaning that it can't do layers or anything like that - it's not really a replacement for Premiere.

If someone knows free, non-linear editors, I'm all ears too. I don't really need one, but I'm curious to see if there are such things. :)


EDIT: As one might expect, Wikipedia does have few suggestions. It (Wikipedia, that is) is becoming more useful than Google these days.
 
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EDIT: As one might expect, Wikipedia does have few suggestions. It (Wikipedia, that is) is becoming more useful than Google these days.
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The later is of no surprise since Google has become such a tangled mess. They really have gone overboard in grappling everything.
Wikipedia's only weakness is everyone can edit it, and some juvinile ninnies (aka fan boys of another console) have oft found there fun in besmirching the other consoles.  It's really dense if you ask me. :D

As for VirtualDub, it's "OK" but has a number of weakness. It's good for transcoding and stream twiddling.  It doesn't have shot book design like Nero or Adobe premier, which is not only classic editing technique it also is more intuitive. The next big weakness is it can't handle Variable bit rate encoding or perform it.  Instead it will mangle the audio immediately.  It has no way of supporting it either.  Audio transcoding is possible but it doesn't support anything but bare essentials.  It only supports one container format unless you use Virtual Dub Mod, that is old enough now that it doesn't support things properly and has a number of anoying bugs for changing the thread priority of the encoder anything other than normal only allows the thread to run sporatically at best.

Cyb
 
Virtualdub is great video editing software and it's free. But it's also rather simple, linear editor. Meaning that it can't do layers or anything like that - it's not really a replacement for Premiere.
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Hey cool, I'll check it out -- thanks  :-)

-RPGillespie
 
Wikipedia's only weakness is everyone can edit it, and some juvinile ninnies (aka fan boys of another console) have oft found there fun in besmirching the other consoles.  It's really dense if you ask me. :D
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Heheh. :) Yeah, some political and/or religious articles are also rather prone to 'edit wars'.

There seems to even be a whole Wikipedia page about lamest edit wars. :P


The next big weakness is it can't handle Variable bit rate encoding or perform it.  Instead it will mangle the audio immediately.  It has no way of supporting it either.
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Oh yeah, I forgot all about the VBR audio issue. I think that either VDMod or Nandub or both can do VBR (well, Nandub certainly should, since it was made for it), but I recall there being some issues with audio sync. It wasn't totally hopeless - seemed to work ok in most players, but few would screw up big time.

But yeah, it's not perfect, and since it's strictly linear, it can't really compete with Premiere.

Dunno, that Avid Free DV seems interesting. It could be quite good - hardware based Avid stuff is certainly good enough for pros - but I have never tried it.
 
I think I would actually choose Windows Movie Maker over VirtualDub. Its no Premiere, but neither is VirtualDub. It may have (much) more encoding functionality, but in terms of editing, WMM is more intuitive.
 
Well you can do the editing in WMM and mess around with the encoding on Window Media Encoder or Windows Media Studio (beta I think), they offer more control over the whole encoding process.
 
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