Help choosing video editing program

[jcikal]

I want to edit scenes out of mpg's avi's and flv's to do a collage of guitarists I admire. Since each video will have different screen size, encoding, audio settings, etc, is there a program that can handle different types of files and put them together into a single video file that doesn't take an einstein brain to figure out?

Thanks.

[dragonkeeper]

Edius is a good choice but has a $600 price tag. What you want can be done with free software as well.

Normally for a project of this type I would render each of the clips i needed to a more editable format usually avi @ 23.976 FPS then use editor of choice to render the finished project.

[aedipuss]

you could check out vegas. it has a free demo available. different versions at various price ranges, all mostly good.

[Des]

MPEG Video Wizard DVD is a pretty straight forward program that should do what you want. It's $100, and will read whatever you have a codec for. Saves out as mpg2.

--dES

[frank239]

Full Video Converter Free is a good choice, it can merge and edit videos with many effects such as blind, flip...
You could edit those videos, then merge

[yoda313]

You could use virtualdub with directshowsource and an open as a avs script (did I say that right?). THen you can at least cut your video and do direct stream copy to save as it is. Or you could frameserve with virtualdub to another program.

For effects you would need another program. Though I'm sure there are lots you could do with avisynth scripts. However I've only dabbled in avisynth and with a lot of hand holding so I can't assist there.

But for starters you could try windows movie maker just to fool around with. However it is pretty basic in nature. (free with xp or newer - you can download whatever the latest version is from microsoft.com).

[Gavino]

You could use virtualdub with directshowsource and an open as a avs script (did I say that right?). THen you can at least cut your video and do direct stream copy to save as it is.

Since Avisynth delivers uncompressed video, that's what you'll get out of direct stream copy, so huge file size.

[yoda313]

Since Avisynth delivers uncompressed video, that's what you'll get out of direct stream copy, so huge file size.

Oh, thanks for the info.