Software recommendation

[pcfitness]

Hi I'm trying to get someone up an going with basic editing/storyboarding and am looking for a sofware recommendation. Its going to be for a specific work task.

Basically, they record forums and conferences and then later put together a 'highlights' DVD. They have a professional camera recording the conference which then delivers to them a MPG2 DVD with time encoding. Then this person typically goes through the DVD and writes down the times of the clips that they want to keep and what order to put them in and gives it back to the production house.

I am looking for a software recommendations to do this as easily as possible with a good storyboard interface that will be light on technical (wizards are good etc). All they need to do is split and splice to a final version that they can burn back to DVD for review and/or to give to production.

I tried it with DVDx to rip, Windows Movie Maker to edit , and Nero to burn but I think it will be a bit fiddly for them and would like something that is easier. I think that Winodws Movie Maker has a decent storyboard interface, but has too many format limits for MPG2 and I'd like to limit changing formats if possible.

What would be cool is to have somethign that can just spit and splice the MPG2 with an easy storyboard interface and reburn it. Does anyone know of any software like that?

The person has an AVerMedia capture card and some software on it, but it appears to be focused on importing analog video. The person also has Nero Vision OEM but it doesn't seem to be intuitive. OS is XP Pro running on a well speced computer and lots of hard drive space.

In this case, cheap is good, but quality sofware that works reliably is better than cheap and fiddly.

Thanks,
Dave

[Bjs]

Welcome to the forum pcfitness

Article containing information regarding story boarding work flow > http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=454800

Then it comes down to tools that can accomplish the task and assets management.

Dvd-lab (more functional, thou newbies can get help here in the forum)
Ulead videostudio (little more straight forward, but less control over menu assets design) ... cheap v9 se in ebay.

Those two are more likely to handle everything you'll need from initial footage input and editing to final output.

There are of course other ways using freeware.