Virginia Gun Owners Forum - VGOF

Howdy, Y'all,

I'm new to video editing and looking for some freeware that will do it all on a winXP platform.

I have home movies on dvd that I would like to spruce up by titling, editing, and audio leveling, and then create an iso to burn back to dvd. I have found several good freeware apps, but they each do a small portion of the job. I'd really like to find an editor that will work with dvd's in their native format. Something that would do a format conversion to allow posting to U-tube would be a bonus, but is not necessary at this point.

Any ideas?

Regards,

George

I think you'll have trouble finding something freeware that will "Do it all".

How about this link? There are several listed with functionality indicated for each. And pricing looks pretty decent as well.

http://video-editing-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

When you figure out which one is best, come back and let us know! lol

You want something in this world for Free??

Just Kidding. I do a lot of video editing and to tell you the truth, a freeware option is very slim when it comes to video editing. Windows XP does have Windows movie maker to do the basic editing. But since you have dvd's that is a bit more complicated. The DVD file format is not something that many editors can edit directly. the DVD format is a VOB file and you have to convert that into an mpeg, mov, avi, wmv, etc before you will be able to do anything with it.

As far as freeware goes you can take a look at CineFX at http://www.cinefx.org . From their website: Cinefx is an offline editing and visual effects tool that allows you to work with any file format in real time on your desktop. Just drag and drop your files into the Cinefx and your are on your way to taking over Hollywood.

I have not used this software, just found it by googling it.

I'll second Windows Movie Maker 2 (the 2 is important) as being the best "free" software if you plan to go to YouTube with it. I have used it for all my "basic" videos in the past.

Otherwise, you have to step up to something paid. You can get free converters for VOB to MPEG or AVI

My camcorder is at this point in time my phone, so I convert from .3GGP to AVI.

Howdy, Y'all,

and thanks for the input. I managed to put together a 15 minute video over the course of about three evenings. The most tedious part was the file conversion process, which took an hour to convert from the .VOB to an editable format, and another hour to covert back to .VOB. The quality of the result was on par with the quality of the source, which was a pleasant surprise given the amount of processing that was involved.

I' try to pass along what I learn.

Regards,

George

I realize this is an old post but I thought I would add to it just in case anyone else comes looking for more info.

Here are a few FREE applications I would recommend to anyone...

Video File Conversion:

Format Factory
http://www.formatoz.com/

All to MP4/3GP/MPG/AVI/WMV/FLV/SWF.
All to MP3/WMA/AMR/OGG/AAC/WAV.
All to JPG/BMP/PNG/TIF/ICO/GIF/TGA.
Rip DVD to video file , Rip Music CD to audio file.
MP4 files support iPod/iPhone/PSP/BlackBerry format.
Supports RMVB,Watermark, AV Mux.

Format Factory's Feature:
1 support converting all popular video,audio,picture formats to others.
2 Repair damaged video and audio file.
3 Reducing Multimedia file size.
4 Support iphone,ipod multimedia file formats.
5 Picture converting supports Zoom,Rotate/Flip,tags.
6 DVD Ripper.
7 Supports 56 languages

Badaboom
http://www.badaboomit.com/

Badaboom is a blazingly fast media converter that formats video files for a variety of devices, including iPod, PSP, iPad, and YouTube, by using your system's graphics processing unit (GPU).

Video Editing:

Windows Movie Maker v2.6 (Supports Vista & Win7)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... layLang=en

Avidemux v2.5.3 (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X)
http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/download.html

Pinnacle VideoSpin v2.0
http://www.videospin.com/Redesign/

Have fun!

More Video File Conversion:

MediaCoder (Free)
http://www.mediacoderhq.com/ (All Windows, Most features work in Linux w/ Wine, Mac OS X w/ Darwine)

MediaCoder is a FREE universal media transcoder since 2005. It integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools in an elegant and transparent manner into an all-in-one transcoding solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, latest codecs and tools are updated added in constantly. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding in all time.

* Converting between most popular audio and video formats
* Multi-threaded transcoding and job-level parallelization
* Transcoding with high performance and high quality
* Flexible control over transcoding parameters
* Simplified UI for popular mobile devices (PSP, iPhone/iPod etc)
* Fully standalone, no dependancy on system codecs/splitters
* Simultaneous Segmental Transcoding (in development)

* Improving compression / reducing size for audio/video files
* Converting media content for playback on multimedia devices
* Converting media content for online publication or broadcasting
* Extracting audio track from video files
* Ripping audio/video discs
* Fixing corrupted or partial downloaded video files

Supported Formats

* Lossy Audio:
MP3, Vorbis, LC-AAC, HE-AAC v1/v2, AC-3, MPEG Audio L2, MusePack, Speex, AMR, Windows Media Audio, ADPCM, mp3PRO*
* Lossless Audio:
FLAC, WavPack, Monkey's Audio, OptimFrog, ALAC, TTA, PCM,
* Video:
H.264, XviD, DivX, MPEG 1/2/4, Flash Video, Theora (Open Video), Dirac, H.263, RealVideo, Windows Media Video, MJPEG
* Container:
AVI, MPEG PS, MPEG TS, Matroska, MP4, PMP, RealMedia, ASF, MTS/AVCHD*, Quicktime*, OGM*
* Storage and Streaming:
CD, DVD, VCD, SVCD, CUESheet*, HTTP*, FTP*, RTSP*, UDP*

* supported as input only

My choices are as follows.

Video editing: Kdenlive. I use it for all my videos now.

File format conversion: MPlayer/FFMPEG. There is simply none better that is actually cross-platform.

Found out something converting my last video series from "raw DV" to Ogg Theora with FFMPEG. There seems to be a bug in the latest version of FFMPEG that doesn't handle Ogg Theora conversions well (there are A/V sync issues), because conversion to other formats works just fine. Previous versions of FFMPEG had no problems, either. Therefore, I'm telling Kdenlive to render it in another format (other than raw DV) instead, and then I convert from that format to Ogg Theora. This has proved an effective workaround, and it saves hard disk space, too!

So why not just use the previous version of FFMPEG? Simple. The current version transcodes to YouTube's new WebM hi-def format. The old one doesn't. When Firefox 4 comes out with built-in WebM HTML5 support (it already has Ogg Theora), I will probably start using that format.