Video editing software......for Mini DV

[StripeyNick]

Hi folks,

My dad spends a great deal of time making railway videos, editing them and putting them on youtube (themichaelwilcock) and, up until a couple of weeks ago, has been using our 10+ year old PC with an old Pinnacle Studio program to do this.

However, naturally, the computer has showed it's age and can't cope with the amount of work my dad is doing so he has replaced it with a new machine which is much better BUT, the Pinnacle program we have doesn't work as it's too old (it's for XP and we're now using Windows 7).

We had to get a firewire connection fitted to the PC as my dad uses mini-dv tapes still (and is working through an archive of 600+ hrs of video) but we are now struggling with what software to get to so he can carry on with his work.

The PC has some NERO s/ware installed but it is quite limited and not very intuitive to use.

The first instinct is to get the current version of Pinnacle as it should be reasonable familiar however reviews of the current version don't seem that favourable.

So, my question is this, do any of you recommend any particular software?

It needs to be able to capture from mini-DV and be reasonably straightforward to use. My dad isnt overly PC literate.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[heart-of-wessex]

I think Sony Vegas Studio might be able to do that.

I'm on Win 7 and still use my old copy of Vegas Studio 9.0 (not the pro version) and for £35-£40, I certainly have my monies worth as I use it to edit all videos, a very powerful program in that it is easy to use, with a lot of tutorials on YouTube to cover the basics, I got the hang of it easily.

What tempted me is that you get a 30 day trail with full use of the tools, once I saw what I could do I bought it. You can't do things like CGI and extreme editing, but you can add text, crossfade, fade in/out, add some effects like B&W, Sepia, mirrored, crossfade effects etc easily, most of which is just drag and drop or click and drag.

If interested it might be worth getting the trial to see if it will work for you.

 

[gazthomas]

If you have the money I would recommend an Apple Mac Mini or iMac. FireWire ports and good software (iMovie) included. Great for someone not too computer literate.

 

[swj99]

I still use Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, and Premiere Elements 2, on an XP machine, so I couldn't say what might be compatible with W7.

However, doesn't Windows 7 come with Windows Movie Maker as standard ? It was there on previous versions of windows. Even the version on XP Pro has a capture facility so you might at least have something to use while you try to find something else.

** Edit
My editing computer was bought new in 2008 to edit a film shot on a single chip mini dv camcorder. It's an AMD 4000, socket 939 single core processor. It's got a reasonable graphics card, but nothing special by today's standards, as in, you probably couldn't run modern games on it. Back then, the computer cost about £350. I then added some extra RAM, 3 extra hard drives because of all the video footage I was editing at the time, plus a higher capacity power supply when the original one fried due to being overloaded.

If you wanted to use older software for simplicity or to keep costs down, then why not just build or obtain something like the one I've described above ? With the cheap availability of components on ebay etc, you could probably build something suitable for less then £70. You could then bung on a copy of XP pro (there's a good self activating version around somewhere so I'm told), which would allow you to use many earlier, and consequently less resource hungry versions of Premiere, Pinnacle, Sony Vegas etc.

 

[PaxVobiscum]

If you have the money I would recommend an Apple Mac Mini or iMac. FireWire ports and good software (iMovie) included. Great for someone not too computer literate.

That's no longer quite true I'm afraid. The current iMac 'Connections and Expansions' specs are:

SDXC card slot
Four USB 3 ports (compatible with USB 2)
Two Thunderbolt ports
Mini DisplayPort output with support for DVI, VGA and dual-link DVI (adapters sold separately)
10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet (RJ-45 connector)
Kensington lock slot

So a Thunderbolt to FireWire convertor would be required.

However, current Mac mini 'Connections and Expansions' specs still include FireWire 800:

Thunderbolt port (up to 10 Gbps)
FireWire 800 port (up to 800 Mbps)
Four USB 3 ports (up to 5 Gbps)
HDMI port
SDXC card slot
Gigabit Ethernet port
Audio in/out
IR receiver

A F/W 9 pin to 4 pin adaptor would probably be required as few cameras were fitted with the 6 pin F/W 400 socket let alone the 9 pin F/W 800 one.

Also not sure how easy it is to get the current version of iMovie to import DV/HDV footage. You might need Quicktime Pro 7.

 

[RogerB]

I think Sony Vegas Studio might be able to do that.

I'm on Win 7 and still use my old copy of Vegas Studio 9.0 (not the pro version) and for £35-£40, I certainly have my monies worth as I use it to edit all videos, a very powerful program in that it is easy to use, with a lot of tutorials on YouTube to cover the basics, I got the hang of it easily.

What tempted me is that you get a 30 day trail with full use of the tools, once I saw what I could do I bought it. You can't do things like CGI and extreme editing, but you can add text, crossfade, fade in/out, add some effects like B&W, Sepia, mirrored, crossfade effects etc easily, most of which is just drag and drop or click and drag.

If interested it might be worth getting the trial to see if it will work for you.

I've just downloaded the trial and am quite impressed. It's the only one I've tried where you can crop and rotate a video with the same program.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
Video Pad seems to be OK, it's free

http://www.nchsoftware.com/index.html

 

[simple simon]

I use the AVS4You software. Its a bit clunky at times but it works. But I only edit films with it.

Simon - youtuber citytransportinfo