Newbie Editing and DV questions???

[Boseaphus]

First off, great site and thanks in advance to those who reply.

I would like to simply record video with my camera (or a new one that I will purchase) and edit little videos for my students (field trips, graduation, etc). I have Adobe Premiere and Vegas Video 3.0 and a few other cheap editing programs. I curently use my High 8 camcorder to capture the video to an mpeg and then "try" to edit it but the video is lame quality and I have had sync problems. If I buy a digital video recorder does that fix those problems. Will it be much easier for me to edit video and make movies? I really don't want to purchase a Mac to do my editing on either. I have a P41.5 gig with 512 ram 80 hd and Gforce 3.
Any advice would be helpful

[fonoop]

It certainly will! I happen to be the proud owner of a dv camera and video editing is allot easier. It just requires a firewire card and a big hard drive. Capturing from a dv camera is loss less since it is just downloading the video instead of capturing it to another format. I use Ulead Video Studio myself and its ALOT easier to edit in than premiere and costs about a sixth of the price. Just to give you an idea of the space it takes up, it takes about 15gigs to capture and produce the final output of a 1 hour video (that’s just me). It would also help if you were running windows 2000 or xp so you could go over the 4gig. file size limit. And no you don't need to purchase a Mac.

[Rich927]

Get a good DV Camcorder if you can. I use Videostudo 6 and it is easy to edit with. A nice feature it has, is when you capture from firewire, you can set it to save each scene in it's own seperate file. When you go to edit, just use the scene files you want. I had one capture that was 30 minutes long and had 55 scenes in it. Thus 55 files. Only used about 12 and I didn't have to cut and paste to get the scenes I wanted. If you are doing analog capture, Pinnacle's Studio 7 does something similar. It makes a scene library for the file it captures. When you load the file, it breaks up into scene thumbnails. You then drag and drop what you want. Once you finish. It will render the scenes you picked. Programs like Videostudio and Studio 7 are good for starting out with or if you are an occassional "Director". They are limited in other areas. Good luck.