complex project advise

[loridunn55]

I have 90 avi's (from camcorder) that I want to do different highlight movies. I started importing into Windows Movie Maker so I could just pull various clips from each movie. Once they were in collections, it didn't take much time to open them and it seemed to work. But not knowing much about Movie Maker, I made the mistake of moving a bunch of the movies in the collections off the internal hard drive to an external hard drive. Boom - all my collections were gone, so I have to start over. I am now wondering if I would be better off with purchasing something like Sony Vegas Movie studio, or if Windows Movie Maker is still the best choice. This has been a large project as it has taken me from January 1 until now to get this far -want to finish it with highlight videos for family members before Christmas! Would appreciate any advise. I am not an expert on video editing and am not necessarily looking for fancy transitions - mainly just want the videos organized.
Any advise is appreciated.

ld

[guns1inger]

I believe you will find Movie Studio much easier and faster to work with.

[loridunn55]

Thanks for the info - it takes me a while to learn - would I be able to pick up Sony Vegas Movie Studio very quickly? Can I easily take clips from multiple movies into it and am I able to render DVD's from it?\
tx
ld

[guns1inger]

Vegas Movie Studio should be pretty easy to learn. It is mostly drag and drop onto time lines, trim with the mouse, drag on transitions, but more intuitively than Movie Maker. You should get the version that comes with DVD Architect Studio for authoring DVDs.

[jagabo]

Movie Studio is a far better editor than WMM but if you move your video files after building projects you'll have the same problem. When you import a video file it isn't copied into a local cache for the editor. The editor simply references the file by it's path name. If you move the file to another drive the editor won't be able to find it and your project will be toast.

[loridunn55]

Thank you for your advise. Guess I'll be buying Sony Vegas Movie Studio. In the past on WMM if I moved a file, I reassociate it or find the missing file and it would be OK - this time, everything got wiped out, including collections, I didn't move. OH - time to learn something new I guess.
ld

[edDV]

For capture I'd recommend WinDV. It doesn't have remote device control but is very reliable. You would cue with camcorder controls.

If you use WMM, be certain to save clips to DV-AVI, not wmv. See DV-AVI under other settings.


For editing you would just import these files into a DV project setting.

Vegas movie studio is fine for editing but has more limited encoder settings vs. Vegas Pro.

Is DVD the final product? If so how many minutes per disc?