Looking for easy video editing software HELP!

[jsgrid]

Please someone out there has to know where I can get an easy to use video editing sofeware program. I am used to audio wave files where you can highlight some part of the wave file and then cut or copy and drop that selected portion of the wave into a new blank wave file and go back to the original and repeat what i just did, or highlight a portion of the wave file and then drop it somewhere with multipul copies. I want to remix a video the way I would an audio wave file. SO when I highlight an area of the video file to do something with it does both the video & audio protion of the file. There has got to be a program out there that doesn't require half my life to learn and is as easy as working with an audio wave file. HELP !!!!! Jerry

[Marco33]

Tmpegnc will do most of the cut and merge stuff but, what you realy want is something like, MGI VideoWave.

It does all the fading in & out, adding sound, cut, paste even capture.

[mkelley]

Assuming you have XP, there probably isn't any better choice than Microsoft's free Movie Maker 2.0.

As always they have made things as simple as possible, and it's actually pretty powerful for freeware. The interface is as easy to use as anyone would ever want. I recommend this to all my non-technical friends.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/moviemaker/default.asp

[Marco33]

2 gigabytes (GB) of free hard disk space


For What?

[mkelley]

Um, not sure I understand your non sequitar.

But I'll bite -- 2 gigs of hard drive space is good for a lot of things: programs, data, swap files. With 120 gigs for $100, that comes to less than $2. So it's not good for money :>)

[housepig]

You could try Vegas Video from Sonic Foundry, or Premiere from Adobe. Both are non-linear editors that will allow you to do the kind of editing you are talking about. I think you can get 30-day trials from their websites.

There's tons of stuff out there - check the Tools section at left.

The downside to most of it is it's pretty pricey for the good stuff - the more options you want, the more you will pay for it.

A couple of freeware non-linear editors exist - MovieXone and Zwei-Stein. MovieXone took me a little digging on Google to find the free one, and Zwei-Stein is at www.thugsatbay.com

download a bunch, check 'em out - it's hard to say what's "easy", it's more like "what's comfortable, what makes sense to me, which interface do I like staring at", etc.

- housepig
- housepig

[Marco33]

Um, not sure I understand your non sequitar.

But I'll bite -- 2 gigs of hard drive space is good for a lot of things: programs, data, swap files. With 120 gigs for $100, that comes to less than $2. So it's not good for money :>)

Microsoft's free Movie Maker says system requirments are 2 gig's.

That's crazy talk.

[mkelley]

Oh, heck, *that's* what you were going on about?

Who the hell cares anymore? Gigs are cheap. Now a tetrabyte, *that's* something <g>.

[Marco33]

I think that's a lot of space for a program.

[mkelley]

Yes, and 4.7gigs is too little space for a DVD-R disk.

I never worry about things I have no control over.