Please help, I have a few questions about editing...

[Gameshow Host]

I'm a bit of a newbie and not sure where to post this question, it's about video editing but I'm also a newbie so I also posted this on the Newbie forum (I'm sorry to cross-post).

First of all I'm not talking about highly compressed movies for Web, I'm just talking about full quality MPEG2 movies for home use. I've just bought a video capture card and want to edit my movies, like trim the beginning and end so they are neater. However, I'm having a few problems...

First of all, I can't even import my movies into Premiere! They don't show up in the import window. AVIs show up, but not mpeg2s. I know the files are there, but Premiere doesn't seem to recognise them.

Secondly, once I import my mpeg2s, I was wondering if there's any way I could crop the beginning and the end of the movie and save it as an mpeg2 again, but without having to recompress. Surely there's a way to just chop the beginning or end off an mpeg2 without losing any quality. It would be nice if there was a simple tool for chopping my mpeg2s at the beginning and the end, without changing the actual middle of the movie at all.

Thirdly, when I watch a movie I have captured (in windows Media player) I want to take a few snapshots so I press "Print screen". But when I paste into Photoshop the video area is blank! Is there any way around this, or any quick and easy way to take screen grabs from a video (without having to edit the video in Premiere)?

Thanks for any help anyone can give.

[jcort]

You cannot import mpeg 2 files into Premier.

[Gameshow Host]

Really? That's a little odd. Premiere is the industry standard video editing application. And mpeg2 is the highest quality video file format (apart from uncompressed avi). It seems strange that you can't edit the best video file format in the best video editor!

Is there any way around this? What do you guys all do to cut down your videos?

[Spicuzza]

Gameshow Host,

I would highly recommend Ulead VideoStudio 6.0 ( www.ulead.com )
You can capture/edit any type of file, capture any frame for a still shot, trim your video anyway you want without an extreme learning curve.

Also, as long as your project settings are identical to your file settings there won't be any re-encoding of your trimmed video. It will simply save a new file the from the mark-in point to the mark-out point.

The program is about $100.00.

I am amazed at the number of posts that are on this site that deal with the same problems with same software over and over and over again.

I'm sure Premiere can run circles around VideoStudio 6.0, but for the most part, for what us amature videographer/moviemakers want to accomplish VideoStudio is by far the best solution I've seen.

I hope this will help you.

Gary Spicuzza
cic7@juno.com

[Gameshow Host]

Thanks for your help! :)