Video editing

cheese_dave

cheese_dave

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One of my other hobbies is editing the video footage I take on holidays into small but (hopefully) interesting and entertaining wee fillums (not those sort of fillums, Pig Cat).

Up until this year I've been getting on well with my JVC digital camera with DV-out, and not quite so well with my Pinnacle Studio Plus editing software (it's got some rendering niggles that never seem to get sorted out from version to version). However the JVC is getting a bit long in the tooth, so I elected to buy a camera with no moving parts in the video storage area, i.e. not a tape or a hard drive.

I've ended up with a Panasonic HDC-SD200, which stores video on an SD card (I have a 16GB card in it which will hold 6 hours of HD footage - stunning, I remember when you couldn't get more than 700KB on a floppy, this is Star Trek technology).

The problem is, the camera doesn't work with my version of Pinnacle Studio Plus (version 10). So I thought I'd throw the query out to the rarely-defeated TSR forum. Anyone do this sort of thing and have experiences of or opinions about video editing software? I'm not looking to remake Lord of the Rings here, so I'm not thinking of spending thousands of pounds on a video editing suite.

Over to you guys...
 
I haven't done much but a mate of mine swears by Sony's Vegas Suite.

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Buy a Mac, iMovie should be bundled with it.

I've had to use Cyberlink PowerDirector a few times and that seemed much easier and more intuitive to use than Adobe Premiere which I've been brought up on.

Should be some trial software kicking about, it's only about £40. As you know its always about the conflicts with editing software.

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When I'm really drunk I prefer using a broadcast quality non linear suite like Avid Composer or Lightworks, Premiere Pro is not bad for knocking together some holiday footage though. ;)
 
Mostly used avisynth for video editing but found that as it didn't have a GUI frontend it was overly complicated as it would need to be run using scripts and usually when you got one filter to work that would bugger up the next one :( moved to virtualdub then.
 
Decent info so far, thanks guys. It's compatibility with the Panasonic format that's bothering me. The Pinnacle software would recognise when I plugged my JVC into the Firewire connection (Firewire, that died a death alright). But when I plug the Panasonic into a USB socket the Pinnacle software doesn't even register it.

I was wondering if anyone was aware of video editing software that actually recognised newer cameras.
 
I've got a Firewire card already. The HDC-SD200 doesn't have Firewire output though.

How about this for a feature:

"Pre-record feature is particularly useful for those special moments you normally miss by being too late to record (select the option and it will include the previous 3 seconds prior to you actually pressing the record button)."

I can't get my head around that!
 
Not my version, but it's about 4 versions old now. Trawling through the gushing Pinnacle www I reckon the new version 14 would read HD formats straight off the card.
 
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