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  1. Member
    Join Date
    Apr 2014
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    England
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    Hi There,

    I work for a mystery shopping company and we are currently looking for an easy to use, cost effective video editing software. We don't need anything overly fancy but fairly easy to use. It MUST be able to quickly crop sections of footage and will ideally render them in small yet good quality files. Ideally .WMV files as most of our work is then burnt to DVD's or occasionally discs.

    Our equipment records to what I believe is .ASF and a couple of the newer sets record to .AVI .

    If anyone could suggest a good program to use we'd really appreciate it. We're not the most tech savvy office hence why we're a bit stuck and I'm not 100% on the information but we know enough!

    Kind regards,

    Harry
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  2. I'm a MEGA Super Moderator Baldrick's Avatar
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    Aug 2000
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    Sweden
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    Isn't windows movie maker enough? It should handle wmv,asf and avi fine.
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  3. Member
    Join Date
    Apr 2014
    Location
    England
    Search Comp PM
    Hi Baldrick,

    Thanks for your response! Windows Movie Maker is what we are using at the moment but it doesn't seem to give consistent final products across our computers. We currently need between three and five machines cropping footage each month to cope with our workload and each machine seems to give out different end products, varying in aspect ratio and quality (both audio and visual). This still occurs when we set them to the same settings.

    Any ideas?

    Harry
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  4. Banned
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
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    United States
    Search Comp PM
    your output quality is dependent on, among other things, input quality. GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out).
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  5. Member
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    Dec 2005
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    Finland
    Search Comp PM
    Sony (Vegas) Movie Studio is a widely-used, inexpensive yet very capable video editing package. There would be plenty of material online and tutorials on YouTube regarding its use. I can't say if it fits exactly your needs, of course, but should be worth looking into. There will be some kind of learning curve with video editing, no matter what software you use.

    http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/compare
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  6. If all you need is clip extraction with no quality loss (not DVD burning) Video to Video Converter can do that. Tools>Split Video
    Once you have your clips in a folder you can use them separately or join them back together (again no quality loss) using Tools>Join Video Files.

    ALWAYS use Direct Stream Copy so that the video/audio information is not converted. Select a specific file format (AVI, WMV etc) if you want to convert. This supposes you do not need titling or transition effects. If you do Sony (Vegas), as suggested, is a better option.

    If you are producing production DVDs I would suggest you use TMPGEnc Authoring Works.
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  7. All $0 options, but learning curve applies:

    For relatively fixed cropping area across all clip:
    1> Avisynth+ AvsPmod
    2> Avisynth+ Megui
    3> Avidemux
    For freehand defining cropping area and aspect ratio fix for each video with realtime preview:
    4> AviUtl
    Last edited by MaverickTse; 10th Apr 2014 at 09:57.
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