Newb needs help with editing a home made video

[ibex333]

Hey guys. I'm in need of your assistance again.


I made a video with my DV Cam for a friend of mine, and now I xfered it to my PC with Windows movie maker. Now I need to cut out some parts that didnt come out good. I tried doing it in WMM, but I cant understand how it's done there. The help file sux.
It says: "Drag a clip onto a storyboard below". I dont want "clips". I want to take my WHOLE video that I saved to "My Videos" folder, and edit that. I want to have the whole video onscreen so I can just drag the slider to the part I want to cut out and get rid of that. Is there such an option in WMM?

Mabe someone can tell me a simple way to do what I need to do in WMM or some other proggy? Any better/easier options than WMM?

PS: I'd also like to know what's the best quality setting to xfer videos from the camera to PC?
There are many options, but I always choose" Best quality for playback on PC". Is there a better setting for preserving the original quality?
I mostly make Video CDs which I then play in a DVD player. The video CD quality is good enough for me so I dont bother with DVDs.

Also, in the future, I'd like to learn how to add effects/narrations/comments to videos to make them look more professional and I'd like to know if there's a way to brighten up the dark parts in videos. I know there's a way to make a dark photo brighter, but I dont know about videos... Thanx in advance.

[redwudz]

WMM calls all videos 'clips'. Just drop your video in there. If you finish editing with WMM, be sure to export as DV. Then take that DV and encode it to MPEG-2. Then you author and burn to DVD. But WMM may not be that well suited to what you want to do.

I use WinDV for the camera to computer transfer. There are no 'settings' involved with a FireWire transfer from a camera, it just transfers 'exactly' what's on the tape. I wouldn't use USB as that is usually low quality video for website use.

I do my simple cut and paste editing with VirtualDub Mod. Then encode to MPEG-2 with TMPGEnc encoder and author to the DVD format with TMPGEnc DVD Author.

There are some all in one programs that may be easier for editing and all the rest. I'll let others make suggestions there.

And welcome to our forums.

[thecoalman]

WMM will "split" clips according to scenes, such as where you have started and stopped recording. This is actually beneficial and how many applications work because it saves you the time of finding these breaks yourself. Generally these are the spots you'll want to edit to begin with...

To drag all the clips simultaneously, select the first clip, press and hold the shift button then select the last clip. Drag away....