f13.net

Recommendations besides Premiere.

Thx 4 looking @ thread. luv u long time.

What exactly are you trying to do? If you are just looking to cut videos there are a bazillion freeware tools that will do the job.

If you are looking for something that can also do transitions, titles, captions, blah blah blah then Vegas. Cheapo consumer version Vegas Movie Studio may work depending on your needs.

Windows Movie Maker (the freebie that comes with your OS) can be made to do some simple things pretty well. If you're looking to buy something though, same questions as Trippy: What are you needin'?

Just working with some frapped video at around 720p. So I need something that can do hdtv resolutions, possibly inlay text as well.

Windows Movie Maker :P

More seriously:
Pinnacle Studio 12
Cyberlink PowerDirector 7

Sony Vegas Movie studio Ulead Videostudio is rated by some people but I didn't like the interface.

Edit - because didn't get right name.

Pinnacle looks decent from the screenshots.

I hate Cyberlinks interfaces so I'm not even going to look at that. Yea, Vegas can be a mess. I used it a few years ago, I doubt it's gotten better.

I'm just sick of Premiere.

Vegas Movie Studio will work assuming the video isn't in some bizarre format (e.g. not sure if it can handle MKV files) and you saw the captioning work I did with Vegas in my TR videos.

If you just need essentially subtitle support there's probably some incredibly complicated workflow that you can use with just freeware tools but I would recommend spending the $100 and getting Vegas Movie Studio. They have downloadable trials so you can see if it'll actually do the job before buying.

Vegas is a real editing system (as in something professionals use), unlike Pinnacle Studio and PowerDirector which are meant for total novices to create their home movies.

Edit: one m

Yea, freeware tools are a waste of my time. This is the type of application that essentially requires professionals make it.

How easy was it to add subtitles with the new version of Vegas?

Also, yea, I used Premiere and Vegas for 2 years decently heavily (with Max/MSP which is 500x more complicated than any video editing program), so I know how. I just... didn't like either much back then.

Also, I'm not doing mkv,probably going to output to 720 or 540p .avi and convert to flv.

Edit: I meant mkv. I'll probably output originally to h.264 as I know Sony supports that shit.

Camtasia Studio by Techsmith (http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp?CMP=KgoogleCStmhome) allows you to convert to flv, and the editor is pretty easy to use. They have a free trial that allows full usage, but buying the software costs $299. It also does screen capture 100 times better than Fraps or Win Movie.

There's a dedicated Text track where you just drop in the appropriate effect from a palette. Then you just type in what you want and set the duration and position on screen, text effects etc. If you want to get fancy you can animate the text as well (there's a timeline for setting keyframes).

How do you gauge 100% better than FRAPS. Just wondering.

Ease of use, editing tools, interface, and quality of screen capture.

It also has ability to add text too, and was something I used at a past job to do Windows based walkthroughs for software.

Download the trial and see for yourself.

Does it put less of a load on my processor and have less overhead than FRAPS? I can pretty much capture 1980x1200 with FRAPS without issue in most games. Does Camtasia fully support a 64-bit architecture and quad core cpus?

Capturing your actions in a desktop app is totally different than capturing DirectX output. Have you used it for capturing game footage and how bad was the slowdown (overhead)?

Are you talking to me? FRAPS only does directx, I assume you aren't talking to me. That said, I get almost no slowdown, though these days I just record at half since half of my res is over 540p.

The screen capture portion of it is very low usage of system resources, and you can capture that screen size easily. I don't know how it would work behind a game, but with the school management software I used it, screen capture was easy. The Direct X output I can't really say, but again, it's a free trial that I'd recommend testing to find out.

I used this a couple of years ago, so don't know about 64-bit, but checking their site, it shouldn't cause any issues.

Because the free trial lets you have full usage, you probably can use it's editor for your project and then forget about it.

Software is totally different from directx layers. I really don't think comparing FRAPS and Camtasia is fair. You should really try FRAPS. I think it's like 30 dollars. I'm going to use the shit out of it for WAR.

Trippy, the new Vegas is awesome. Thanks.

Ok. Now for recording audio, through a mic. Should I just stick with Sound Recorder?

Edit: Balls, I didn't install sound recorder when I installed vista and my disc is packed away. Nutter.

Ahem, sound editing and capture also included with Camtasia Studios... but you're already going a different route.

You need to just record sound? Audacity (freeware) (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/)

Use Audacity like taolurker mentioned above. Vegas can do it as well but I can't remember if the Movie Studio version supports it.

NewTek SpeedEDIT (http://www.newtek.com/speededit/)

Vegas Pro is a real editing system.  Vegas Movie Studio is just another home movie editing package - same difference between those as Pinnacle Studio and Pinnacle Liquid (or Premiere Elements and Premiere Pro I suppose).  Not that it matters because I realise I've never used any version of it and I was thinking of Ulead Videostudio which I recall as being total and utter shite.

No it's not. It shares the same UI and functionality as its big brother. The differences are in things like the max number of tracks you can have and some of the more advanced features like color correction which are missing. To put it another way I bought a basic Vegas Pro book to learn how to use Vegas Movie Studio and there was nothing in the book that I looked at that I couldn't do in Movie Studio and the steps were exactly the same. It's analogous to how Final Cut Express is a trimmed down version of Final Cut but it shares the same UI and basic functionality of its big brother.

I'll take your word for it - I haven't used either (although may give it a go on my next project if you recommend it). It does strike me that selling a trimmed down product for £40 and a pro product that, more or less, has the same functionality as the basic package for £450 means that Sony are missing the point a little.

You'd be surprised what you can get that freebie to do. But of course if you're coming at this from having used Premiere, Final Cut or Pinnacle, yea, not even worth a mention.

It's what it can't do that's more of an issue for creating anything more than a home movie.  Like multiple audio tracks for a start.

Apple does the same thing, selling their ~$1000 product (Final Cut Pro, which you can no longer buy separartely) for $199 as the Express edition (but the Express version is less crippled than Vegas Movie Studio is to Vegas Pro). Avid used to do the same thing but their prices are/were like an order of magnitude higher (i.e. their "crippled" version was still >$1000) so they didn't really have a "prosumer" version of their software like Sony and Apple do.

Vegas is faster, more flexible (once you get things set up) and more efficient than Premiere. But then, Adobe has been in the bloatware business for a long time. I like this, I like it a lot.

I can't get output -> FLV working unfortunately, but I'll figure it out eventually.

Oh and let me just say, Riva FLV encoder eats ass. >_>

Final Cut is the real Premiere version 2. For some unknown reason Adobe didn't want the work the original developers of Premiere were doing on the next iteration of Premiere so the developers took it to Apple which gladly accepted it. So Adobe's been limping along all these years on an ancient video editing engine and have only put in nominal resources to shoring it up to keep it semi-competitive at least on paper.

If you just want to use a crappy FLV codec (i.e. Sorenson 3) you can use ffmpeg to make them which is what all the big sites like YouTube use since it's so fricking fast. If you want to go state-of-the-art and don't mind forcing your viewers to upgrade to Flash 9+ you can actually just make an H.264 MPEG-4 video which Flash 9+ can play back. An in-between solution is to cough up a few dollars and get Flix Standard and encode in the VP6 format which is like Flash 7+ (maybe even 6+) compatible.

That's cause it uses ffmpeg and the Sorenson 3 codec.

Flash 9 is h.264 compatible? Well, balls. That's awesome.

Is there a plugin or something for Vegas? I saw it does mp4 and h.263, but Sony adopted h.264 only recently.

Nevermind. Just saw the Mainconcept AVC option. I don't even know why they have fraunhofer mp4s in there.